Miners & Holes
by Bibliotecaria.D
Summary: Megatron and Impactor made a habit of getting into small, tight places.
1. Chapter 1

Megatron and Impactor made a habit of getting into small, tight places.

* * *

 **Title:** Miners & Holes

 **Warning:** Sex. Handjobs, blowjobs, masturbation, size kink, non-gore vore, fluids, aft port.

 **Rating:** NC-17

 **Continuity:** IDW

 **Characters:** Impactor/Megatron

 **Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn't own the script or actors.

 **Motivation (Prompt):** _Prewar miners + postwar vore Impactor/Megatron commission for Baiku, in a legitimate purchase of a miner's aft._

* * *

 **[* * * * *]**

 **Pt. 1**

 **[* * * * *]**

* * *

Light was a precious commodity down in the mines. They had equipment for it, but energy cost money. Electric conduits lined the top of the main living shafts to feed the bare bulbs regularly studding the ceilings in and out of the bunk slots, and a miner could count on one hand the amount of lights actually on at any one time.

Everything down in the mines centered around saving money. Safety regulations and ease of access were less important goals. Miners paid their own way; light was expensive.

Shifts shared bunk slots because, the operations manual claimed, it promoted mingling between the shifts. Theoretically, if someone from the previous shift didn't show up before his slotmates left for their own shift, they would notice the empty bunk and alert the sector manager. In practice, the bunks were only used for recharge. Nobody kept track of anybody's whereabouts unless it was a friend. The lights were always off for the energy conservation, so it'd take sitting on someone to find out if the bunk opposite was currently occupied. Alerting the sector manager that one of their slotmates hadn't come back last shift just annoyed everyone involved as, more likely than not, the mech in question had slipped in and out unnoticed in the perpetual darkness, or he'd taken an off-shift to hit the surface for some fresh air.

In the case of the miner who'd bunked in Slot #113 before Megatron, he'd been missing an undetermined amount of time before the twice-a-year trash sweep logged the bunk as empty. For all anyone else in the slot knew, he'd quit, died, or moved into a fragbuddy's bunk permanently. The sector manager never cared to look. He simply noted there was an empty bunk and assigned it to the newbie.

Impactor hadn't noticed his shift-buddy leaving. They worked different tunnels, barely nodding in passing if they bothered to recognize each other that much. Impactor typically hadn't. He didn't get attached to people down here. First shift in Slot #133 had the upper bunks, second shift had the lower, and what that boiled down to in the end was Impactor rolling over to put his back to the rest of the room. Slots were for sleeping, not socializing. He had places to be and work to do down here, and other people's input on his habits and hobbies wasn't welcome. The most he could say about the missing mech was that he'd kept to himself, and Impactor was left with the vague impression of a body taking up space in the bunk next to his.

So what's-his-face disappeared without anyone noticing, and Megatron joined Slot #113 as Impactor's shift-buddy. That, Impactor noticed.

Where Megatron went, the light of a tiny tablet went. Light was a precious commodity, almost as rationed as energon or free time. To see it glowing in the hands of a miner meant nothing to the official regs but defied every unwritten guideline for living beneath the surface. The small rectangle of light and words was a self-contained act of passive, subversive resistance to unspoken social rules. Megatron didn't get above his station the way some miners did by installing mods or buying extra chrome, but he was giving the higher-ups a rude gesture all the same.

This was Impactor's kind of mech.

Impactor, on the other hand, wasn't Megatron's usual crowd. Megatron was some sort of nerd, one of those people who didn't belong in the body he had. He was gentle, well-read, and articulate in a frustratingly round-about way that always made Impactor feel as though the mech couldn't get straight to the point. Megatron had to talk three times as much to reach the same place, all the while using fancy metaphorical phrasing and harmonious wording that was supposed to make it deeper and more meaningful but could ultimately be ignored, in Impactor's opinion. Short and to the point was more Impactor's style. It came out the same in the end, he thought.

Megatron didn't agree. The mech valued his opinion, however, and continued to read him poems. He insisted Impactor give him an honest reaction so they could _talk_ about it.

Since Megatron had come into the slot, Impactor had argued more over literature than ever before in his life, including the vast, engex-lubricated complaint marathons the miners held about the mine operations manual. The manual made more sense, and that was saying something. Megatron's poetry gave Impactor a processor ache trying to parse the message into something a miner could understand.

"But that's the **point** ," Megatron said, leaning across the narrow gap between their berths, his handful of light spilling in a glittering waste of energy onto Impactor's dull paintjob. "You're not **just** a miner. You said yourself that you've had no formal education, but you're capable of understanding my meaning **despite** being kept ignorant! You're more than a machine they just point at the ground and forget about. You've picked up a wider understanding by exposure alone. Imagine what you'd be like without the Functionalists telling you what you can and can't learn."

Talk like that was as rebellious as a punch to their supervisor's face, only less violent and more likely to get a mech disappeared in the dark if the words reached the wrong audios. Impactor stared at Megatron's earnest expression and felt a stirring in his gut he associated with a flash chassis up on the surface. Not that squared angles and caution paint didn't do it for him, but brakes on a highway if Megatron revved up on poetry didn't turn his engines.

Light flickered on the walls of the slot as Impactor knocked aside the tablet, curbing his strength to avoid cracking it, careful in his carelessness as only a fellow miner could appreciate. He curled his hand behind Megatron's neck, up under the helmet where his fingertips could tease the fragile edges of broadcast panels. Megatron dragged in a short breath, not quite a gasp but something surprised, a word half-said because what would this glitch be without trying to complicate the primal simplicity of lust with ornate words? Impactor chuckled and pulled, drawing him closer.

Megatron relaxed into him, and Impactor let go in order to delve between Megatron's thighs, fingers sliding through the shadows cast by the tablet's screen. Impactor lit one optic to watch even as rough teeth and lips kept the other miner distracted. The scarcity of light turned the slow rise of a spike into a fiercely erotic sight. He could see it all he wanted up on the surface, but here shadows dappled his hand into flashes of seen and unseen, hidden and in plain sight, bringing out into the open what miners usually did in the dark.

He felt uncomfortably exposed, pumping Megatron's spike in the light. Miners didn't do that. It looked too much like giving instead of taking, and manual labor builds didn't do that. They weren't allowed to do that. The Functionalists never explicitly said it, but the darkness made it pretty clear how they thought miners should act. Hook-ups in the dark, connections made quick, fast, and silent, and then anonymous hands and mouths went their way to slots where no one knew if the right mech had taken the empty bunk.

Impactor watched Megatron's spike thrust in and out his hand, lit by unnecessary light for whom and what they were, and he smirked into the kiss. Megatron was gasping now, muted hitches in time with the squeeze of Impactor's fingers. That was poetry, to him. This was as nonviolent as his defiance got, crude action and no words, but the same subversive attitude as the nerd's prettied up poems.

Megatron shuddered, spilling out into his hand, and they left the light on.

* * *

 **[* * * * *]**


	2. Pt 2

Megatron and Impactor made a habit of getting into small, tight places.

* * *

 **Title:** Miners & Holes

 **Warning:** Sex. Handjobs, blowjobs, masturbation, size kink, non-gore vore, fluids, aft port.

 **Rating:** NC-17

 **Continuity:** IDW

 **Characters:** Impactor/Megatron

 **Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn't own the script or actors.

 **Motivation (Prompt):** _Prewar miners + postwar vore Impactor/Megatron commission for Baiku, in a legitimate purchase of a miner's aft._

* * *

 **[* * * * *]**

 **Pt. 2**

 **[* * * * *]**

* * *

Impactor slammed into Slot #113 how tired miners usually ended their shifts: he fell against the open door jamb to stop forward progress down the hallway, then rolled off into the cramped quarters with a grunt. Minimal effort for maximum amount of distance.

"We're going up to the surface," he announced as he lurched over to lean on the bunks.

"Why am I going up to the surface? I don't have surface time scheduled." Megatron didn't look up at him. Too absorbed in writing. He couldn't have been off-shift any longer than Impactor, but he already had his tablet out. He used every spare moment to scribble more words. Words words words. The mech had an obsession.

He could afford flowery words only so long before action had to be taken. That was the part Impactor couldn't seem to get through the other miner's head, but then again, Megatron hadn't been down in the dark long enough to really see how things worked. He knew, sort of. He just hadn't been held back at the end of the shift by a supervisor yet. The experience would bring home the lack of power words had down here.

In Impactor's case, today's reminder made him need the surface, where at least words could be heard if they were said. Today hadn't been a good day for that. He'd given action a try since words weren't worth it, and that hadn't gone over so well either. He could take most mechs in a fair fight, but not when his opponent brought a pistol to a fist fight. Not much to do at that point but shut up and take the beating.

He realized he'd zoned out when Megatron actually looked up from precious poetry writing. The gasp woke him out of his thoughts.

"What the frag happened to you? Impactor!" Light splattered over the bunks, on the walls, moving in frantic flashes as the tablet clattered to the bunk. Megatron was already up, hands painted in the dull, barely perceptible glow given off by processed energon.

Impactor blinked in tired wonder at the light. After a second of staring, he looked down at himself. Oh. That was _his_ energon getting everywhere.

He ran a quick diagnostic on self-repair and relaxed. Nothing but painful cosmetic damage. The boss had wanted to teach a lesson, not kill him. He told his friend, "Supervisor didn't like my face," which was true enough.

Supervisor hadn't liked having his ore weights questioned. Supervisor had decided a miner who complained too loudly about uneven scales was volunteering to be a lesson to the rest of the shift about keeping their complaints to themselves. Words versus pistol-whipping resulted in about what anyone would expect.

"Your supervisor did this? What in the dark did you do to get under his plating? This is absurd. He's not allowed to do this. Physical discipline of workers is prohibited by the regs. You can get him fired." Impactor almost laughed at the idea, but Megatron had him by the chin, fingers carefully probing the dents. He was so blasted earnest about workers' rights. Impactor settled for huffing amusement.

Megatron took the opportunity to slide two fingers into his mouth, prodding at the gashes. "Ouch," he hissed as he touched the bleeding cuts. The sympathy should have grated and instead just felt companionable. Naive as Megatron was about how the world under the surface worked, he was no stranger to authority figures shutting him up the hard way. He had thick repair scars on the inside of his cheek and bottom lip, too.

"Don't swallow," he advised as if Impactor hadn't been getting into fights longer than he'd been online. "Try to keep your tongue pressed to this one." Fingertips used to tapping tiny keys on the tablet screen delicately nudged the edges of the biggest gash together.

Impactor's optics crossed as he watched the hand trying to fit into his mouth. Waving off Megatron's concern never worked, and he didn't try too hard this time. Being fussed over felt kind of nice. Having someone turning his head into the tablet's light by the chin, optics focused as the dripping trails of energon were tracked back to the burst tubes...it made him feel like somebody cared. Also, it got something into his mouth, and frag if the suggestion didn't suddenly put him in the mood for that.

Megatron paused. "Why are you snickering?" He eyed his friend. Suspicion collected in his optics, and they narrowed. He abruptly yanked his hand out of Impactor's mouth, and energon plopped to the floor.

Gears popped as Impactor worked his jaw, clicking everything back into place. "Ow," he said in a mild tone. He caught Megatron by the arm before the mech could sit back down and clam up for the night in an offended sulk. "Ready to go?" he asked. Thanking another miner for help would be acknowledging help was offered in the first place. It didn't occur to him to put words to the faint sense of gratitude, but he had every intention of buying the first round of drinks up top.

"You shouldn't go up to the surface," Megatron snapped, pulling his arm free. "Get your aft to Mediclav if you want your nose straightened, and shut down for the rest of the shift."

"Mediclav won't blow me," Impactor said almost idly. "Not for free, anyway."

Megatron hesitated, tablet in hand but optics on Impactor. "What?"

"Free blowjobs."

"I..."

"On the surface. I know where to get free blowjobs."

The lure of poetry was strong, but Impactor knew how to use his words. He had the nerd. Poetry writing couldn't compare to the lure of someone prepared to suck like a shop vac. Horribly conflicted optics stared up at him. He smirked back, dribbling dully glowing pink energon from the corner of his mouth.

It soon became the only light in the slot besides their optics as Megatron shut down the tablet. "Can't get free health care on this planet, but you can get a free blowjob," grumbled up at Impactor. A storage unit clinked, locking shut.

"Yeah, but notice how nobody ever says we don't have the right to assembly when it's an orgy," Impactor pointed out, grinning wider. He'd had a supervisor who used to bend him over the load carts and laugh when Impactor bitched about his lack of stamina. He only got the slag beat out of him when the complaints were about the mine. "So, you ready to go **now**?"

Peeved red optics glared at him before turning to exit the slot. "Might as well hit the surface. I've been stuck all day on that poem."

"Why? What's the problem? Can't cram any more syllables into it?"

Megatron stopped ahead of him for half a second. "Couldn't come up with a title."

"Are you kidding me?"

"It's important!"

"For bootin' up cold..." Impactor shook his head and pushed at the nerd's back. "We need to get you laid, mech."

"How bad's your memory fatigue? Got laid last night. Who was it? Who could it have been?" Megatron tsked to himself. "Some old miner. He can't remember it the next day, so he can't be that great in the bunk."

Impactor smacked the glitch upside the helm, and they bickered and scoffed at each other the whole way to the surface lift. They relied on hands on the walls most of the walk, Impactor's headlights dim illumination until their feet found the familiar tracks of the main loadcart rail. From there on, energy conservation and habit guided them through the pitch black. Their conversation was barely interrupted by the rattling thrum of carts running. The vibration hit a certain level, they stepped off the rails, the carts rolled past, and they stepped back on as soon as it passed.

They emerged blinking into the tally areas, nodding to the miners waiting for their ore loads to be weighed in and sneering behind the supervisors' backs. The closer they got to the surface lift, the more lights were online. The sections were more active. They had to duck more carts and wait for intersections to clear before crossing.

The ride to the surface was long. It wasn't boring, but the usual crowd of miners going up had already left. Impactor's 'disciplinary meeting' had lasted through the rush for surface time. Neither of them knew the group of miners in the lift with them, but Megatron's natural friendliness was countered by Impactor attempting to set his own nose now that they could stand still and had some decent light to see by.

By the time they reached the surface, Megatron's hands were soaked in dull pink again, and Impactor looked like he had a mask on. A pink, dripping mask.

"You're a mess."

"Trust me," Impactor pushed his friend's shoulder, steering him to the right on the street outside, "where we're going, nobody's gonna care what my face looks like."

Megatron gave him a dubious look but obediently started walking. "I don't have the spare shanix for renting company."

"Yeah, yeah, saving up." The lights up here on the surface shouldn't impress him, not as old as he was, but Impactor still spent more time looking up than he did watching where he walked. He stared up at the stars out up beyond the neon signs lining the street. "Got enough for a drink or three?"

"Maybe one."

"Two. I'm buying the first round." He elbowed Megatron and pushed him toward a dark doorway wedged between two dazzling, over-decorated street-level shops. One was the private cinema, porn flicks on demand in booths that could fit three people if they were real friendly. That was kind of the point, so everyone tried to fit a fourth in while they were at it. The other door was actually plain by itself, but he'd never seen it without two or three pieces of shareware draped on the bouncer like mobile advertisements.

They saw the two miners coming and turned on their blinkers, biolights brightening from standby to full come-hither sparkle. Sleeks lines were accented by long, unprotected tubes that changed colors in attractive patterns. Reds were popular. It was the least useful color of light down in the mines, making it an indulgence. Everything about the pretty mechs screamed indulgence, in fact. He'd had his share of what they sold, and even the solidly-built cargo-loader glittering from beside the bouncer had to be handled with care. Impactor's headlights had heavy metal cages protecting them, but these mechs had nothing but seduction and money protecting their glass. Those lights were pure decoration.

Light was expensive down under. Up here, a miner could buy as much of it as he wanted. The rooms for rent past that decorated doorway had lights in every corner and mirrors on every wall, blindingly white. Even with the lights off, the shareware reflected every color of the spectrum until either the money ran out or the customer was finally satisfied.

Megatron saved his shanix. He didn't have the knack of ignoring purring, light-blinking mechs, and the cluster of shareware saw his growing wonder at their display. Impactor shook his head as they sighed and posed, one of them making the softest _tick-tack-tick-tack-tick-tack_ as blinkers flashed today's specials. And some offers public decency laws kept them from shouting out loud. Noise regulations didn't cover photolingual.

Or chirolingual. "Don't let them get ahold of you," he muttered. "You won't know if they're talking hand or giving you a handjob until they ask for a tip."

Optics rounded, and Megatron spluttered a laugh as Impactor forged ahead, heading for the dark door. The shareware turned their attention to the next mark when it became clear he was headed upstairs. Megatron gave them a last look before following.

He seemed disappointed when the stairs ended in a bar. A dark, grimy bar, at that, full of grime-coated miners hiding in the dark, swilling drinks too dark to be good quality from glasses still grimy from the last drink poured into them. The tables were bolted to the floor. Every seat was a booth or a sturdy stump, less barstool than parts of the floor. The engex bottles behind the bar were locked into a cupboard shielded by thick bars. The bartender passed drinks out from behind similar bars.

Impactor immediately felt at home. He fit in, here. Most of the mechs here were built to his model specs or heftier, and the distinctive feel of a fight brewing filled the air. Yeah. Yeah, somebody was getting his face smashed in tonight, and Impactor needed to be here when that person showed up. If that person turned out to be him, well, his supervisor had already gotten a headstart on the festivities.

Megatron looked around uneasily. "Why are we here?" he asked in a hushed voice as soon as Impactor paid and the drinks were pushed out onto the bar for them to take. He liked bars as much as the next miner, but Megatron was, at spark, a pacifist. "What **is** this place?" He followed his friend to the nearest open booth but didn't stop looking nervous.

Impactor clinked their glasses together. "Facefight."

"What?"

Impactor slammed back his drink and felt his filters protest. The slag this place served tasted as bad as it looked, but the unspoken rule of coming here was it cost at least one drink. Once he coughed his intake clear, he said, "It's called Facefight."

Megatron stared at him.

That was kind of disappointing. "I thought you liked wordplay."

"Wordplay? What word...play..." Impactor could almost see the connection being made. The nerd slowly sat up straight, looking around again. "You...how does..."

Impactor made a feint for Megatron's glass and grinned as the other miner hunched over it protectively. "See the doors past the bar?"

Megatron made a point of taking a drink before looking. Two doors hid in the gloom around the corner of the bar itself. As he watched, one door opened and a mech swaggered out. He was one of those miners broader than he was tall, and he had to turn sideways to get through the door. The smug expression he wore was almost as wide as he was.

"That's...where the 'facing is?" Megatron asked after staring for a moment.

"Ehhhh, more face than **'face** , if you know what I mean." Megatron gave him a deadpan stare before looking back to the doors. Impactor grinned. "Blowjobs only. You go in the one with a hole if you want one or want to give one."

Megatron squinted at the doors. "They both have a hole."

"Exactly."

"But - oh."

Impactor leaned back and chuckled. "Give or take, nobody's gonna know. You go in, grab a stall, close the door, and punch the right button. Anybody goes in the other side, all they see's the light go on. Blue for _'Ready to suck'_ and purple for _'Suck this.'_ " He frowned. "Yellow's, uhhhh. Huh. _'I'm easy,'_ I guess. Means you're up for either."

Megatron was still watching the door. "But nobody's coming out of the other door."

The curiosity about who the miner's partner had been made Impactor snigger. "There's an exit at the end of the stalls on the other end. Unless your supervisor's here keepin' track, nobody pays attention to who's in and out. Stay as long as you gotta to get what you're after, then leave or go." He winked when Megatron gave him a startled blink. "Almost poetic, right?"

Surprise flattened to a thoroughly unimpressed glare. "Hardly."

He laughed and pushed out of the booth. "Says you. I'm staying 'til things kick off here tonight, but you don't gotta come back out afterward."

Megatron didn't need to ask what would kick off. The blocky miner was exchanging a preliminary round of insults with someone half his weight and twice his attitude. There would be a fight in full swing as soon as everybody downed a couple more drinks to lubricate their fists. Nobody looked to be in a hurry. There was a certain sense of inevitability in this bar.

Impactor went into the door closest to the bar with his shoulders back and chest out, knowing there were optics on him. Everybody came to this bar for one thing or the other, and those not preparing for the fight were looking for a frag. What the swing of his hips and energon-stained lips advertised wasn't on the level of the shareware glittering outside, but it was advertisement all the same.

Besides: free. Free had appeal extra-bright lights couldn't beat.

Two of the stalls had closed doors, and three lights lit the dark, narrow hallway, telling him three mechs were ready on the other side. At the end, the exit sign blared. Impactor swung into the next empty stall and closed the door.

He didn't have to ponder his choice. His knees thunked to the floor, and he fumbled at the wall to find the right button. There weren't any lights in here. As erotic as light could be in its scarcity underground, this place was about anonymity. Up on the surface, darkness became a tease.

A tiny blue bulb lit, and Impactor sat back on his heels to wait.

He didn't have to wait long. A door creaked on the other side, and loud footsteps clomped through. They passed the stall, fading slightly as the mech went down the hall, choosing his pleasure as it were. The door creaked again, and another pair of footsteps entered at a slower pace. Even without the lack of confidence, Impactor would have recognized who this was. Megatron probably didn't walk that much different than anyone else, but Impactor was used to hearing those feet in the dark.

The hasty rush to scramble into the nearest stall the moment he realized the other miner was still in the hallway gave the nerd away, too. Impactor didn't know any other miner who'd get flustered. If he saw anyone else in the hallways here, he just grunted and squeezed by while making aggressive optic contact daring the mech to say something. He'd expect the exact same in return. It was the macho miner code. Megatron just hadn't gotten the hang of how things were done, yet.

Impactor shut off his vocalizer, grinning away in the dark. This wasn't how it normally went, but frag, he wasn't opposed to it. Wouldn't be the first time.

Although a gloryhole wasn't like a rough blowjob while tumbling in the bunks. The wall put certain limitations into play, and one side of this little exchange had no idea whose mouth waited on the other side of it. Impactor could almost see the situation sinking into Megatron's head. Feet scraped on the floor, and a thoughtful hum floated through the hole at optic-level with him. The words had to be buzzing in the nerd's head, assigning meaning and layers and metaphors to a straightforward interface. Seemed straightforward to Impactor, anyway. Stick spike in hole and profit, but it was never that simple in Megatron's mind.

Whatever else he did, however, no miner survived safety training a prude. Something thunked on the wall - a hand or a shoulder or maybe even Megatron's forehelm - and a familiar click preceded exactly what Impactor had been craving since a certain too-nice miner stuck fingers in his mouth trying to help him out.

Being anonymous let him do things different. Impactor locked his vocalizer down, making sure even a grunt couldn't give him away. He suddenly didn't want to betray himself to his friend. Miners didn't do this for each other, not like this. Miners grabbed what they wanted. Grabbed and took, no waiting or patience.

He pursed his lips on the tip of the spike in front of him, feeling it out by touch. Megatron in-vented, quick and sharp. Impactor pushed forward, bobbing his head in a slow rhythm that stopped between each push. Push down, lips parting, and draw back in a strong suck, and stop with his lips sealed around the head. His tongue played with it, drawing wet circles along the smooth area around the pinprick hole. Then he pushed again, opening his mouth and sliding his tongue along the underside, tonguetip catching on the pressure sensors, tripping down the length.

The quick in-vent became a stuttered breath. Megatron's vents closed as Impactor swallowed him down in one long, luxurious push, and hot air panted out in short blasts as warm, wet suction backed off. The flicking tongue playing on his tip caused his hips to shiver, rattling the plating against the wall. Impactor backed off further when those hips jerked desperately, thrusting into the wall as if more could be forced through the hole and into his mouth.

But the wall blocked the thrust. Impactor released the spike head with a loud _pop_ , and a groan came clearly through the wall between them. He laughed silently. Wrapping his hand around the length, he gave it a good squeeze and set about abusing the tip poking out past his thumb. Slurping licks loudly announced to anyone in nearby stalls what got this miner's heavyduty engine revving, because louder than the broad, slick rill of his tongue on spike was the sobbing cough of an engine straining for air.

Fingers scraped on the wall, elbows clanking against it up over Impactor's head. He glanced up into the darkness like he could see Megatron scrabbling for a handhold. Nice.

The spike in his hand tried to slip his grip, the tip popping back through his fingers as Megatron frantically pumped into the hole, fragging his fist, and Impactor punished him by tightening his hold. Maybe it was a reward. Megatron sure didn't hesitate to buck into the sudden squeeze, wet spike squipping back out into cool air.

Cool air replace by the hot suction of Impactor's mouth as he gave in and let Megatron have what he was moaning for. At his own pace, of course. Sucking a fellow miner off under the surface was more about being a hole for use. Impactor wanted to take _his_ time, here where he had the control.

When his jaw ached, he backed off despite Megatron's protesting moan. He curled his tongue under the head and swirled it, stretching stiff cables while making Megatron curse him softly, barely audible over the whirr of fans and harsh scrape of hips and hands against metal. Impactor smiled against the tip, teeth a hard tease on it. Big, blunt fingertips pet the hot length of it, finding the biolights flushed to a dull glow by pressure built up in the tubing inside.

Translucent pink, the color of healthy energon, the brightness of an expensive drink. The color of a spike ready to spill out, teased past a fast overload where circuits tripped and a mech got a squirt of fluid from reserves. Impactor admired it, gloating to himself at the hitch of Megatron's vents.

Megatron had his tablet, his words to drive back the darkness. Impactor didn't have much use for that kind of thing. This was different. This was a light in the dark he had every kind of use for, and he'd gotten it by action.

He shrugged off the thoughts. Too poetic for his own good. Why make something more out of a fat, stiff spike than a decent mouthful?

Impactor went back down on Megatron's spike, helmcrest and lips pressed to the wall, broken nose leaking a steady stream as he nuzzled into the hard metal, and his throat intake convulsed around hot, pulsing spike. He swallowed once, twice. Three times, and Megatron overloaded in a searing jet down his throat, engine _roaring_ as he clawed at the wall and desperately pumped in and out of Impactor's intake through climax, spike throbbing in long spurts.

There was nothing poetic about that. It was just raw, filthy rutting in the dark.

On the other hand, Impactor could have written at least a dirty limerick from the dazed, contented look of sated exhaustion on the nerd's face when he staggered back into the bar ten minutes later. He gave Megatron his best slag-eating grin. "Have fun?"

"Wipe your mouth," Megatron muttered back at him.

Impactor's smile spread in challenge. The evidence stood out in bits of light limning his teeth. "Make me."

Megatron, of course, ended up writing a poem about the bar fight they started. The fragging nerd.

* * *

 **[* * * * *]**


	3. Pt 5

Megatron and Impactor made a habit of getting into small, tight places.

* * *

 **Title:** Miners & Holes

 **Warning:** Sex. Handjobs, blowjobs, masturbation, size kink, non-gore vore, fluids, aft port.

 **Rating:** NC-17

 **Continuity:** IDW

 **Characters:** Impactor/Megatron

 **Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn't own the script or actors.

 **Motivation (Prompt):** _Prewar miners + postwar vore Impactor/Megatron commission for Baiku, in a legitimate purchase of a miner's aft._

* * *

 **[* * * * *]**

 **Pt. 3**

 **[* * * * *]**

* * *

This was why equipment maintenance was crucial. When things went wrong, it was inevitably at the wrong time, or in front of the worst person possible.

Impactor quirked a brow at the scene in front of him. "When they said you wanted some privacy t' deal with a medical matter, this ain't what I pictured. Being captain mean you can pull out the fancy terms for alone-time?"

"Didn't you die?" Megatron glared _up_ over his shoulder. Of all the times...

"Weren't you a 'Con?"

Fair enough. Both of them looked away, so neither could say who gave in first.

Silence filled the space between them until Impactor finally stepped inside the room and let the door close. "Thought you were taller than this."

It wasn't the smoothest start to a conversation, but when one's ex-buddy-turned-enemy walks in on one wanking, smooth wasn't anywhere in sight. Megatron gritted his teeth and palmed his spike again, just for spite. He wouldn't give Impactor the satisfaction of throwing him off.

"Malfunctioning mass displacer," he grunted between pumps. "It **is** a medical problem, and I **did** lock the door for privacy due to it. First Aid claims it will sort itself out faster if it's allowed to run through the settings on its own." In the meantime, he shrank. He wasn't quite short enough yet to make Rewind look tall, but he was getting there.

"Uh-huh." Impactor peered over him at the slick head of the spike sliding in and out of a black fist. "Then this 'just happened,' right?"

"Doesn't it always?" Megatron muttered. His shoulders hunched. It was getting harder to keep his mind on getting off. It wasn't every day an ex-Wrecker-former-friend busted into his hab suite and stood there watching him like a war hadn't happened. Like nothing had changed.

A lot had changed. Six months aboard the _Lost Light_ had conditioned him to accept weird things happening, however. Part of him wanted to ask what the frag Impactor was doing here. The part of him that was used to Rodimus now advised him to just roll with the ridiculous stuff that regularly walked through the door these days. Impactor had showed up. So what? Finish jerking off, then deal with it.

Impactor had seen worse. Impactor had seen him do this many, many times, in fact.

"Getting close, ain't ya," growled above him, and Megatron clenched his jaw to hold in a moan. Suddenly, it wasn't work to stay hard. Warm, huge, and familiar, Impactor vented on the back of his neck with every word. "You still do this the same. You got a way of pushin' your knees together and foldin' up, like ya gotta hide it. We ain't in the mines sharin' bunk space with the other shift."

And he did still do that, Megatron realized. His free hand was braced against his knee, pushing inward as if to make himself smaller, and he bent over his lap even as his hand worked faster. It was unnerving to recognize how this, of everything, was the same.

Then Impactor's mouth closed on the nape of his neck, and the years fell away. Whatever sound tried to get out of him died in his vocalizer, but his whole body rose up into the teeth rough under the rim of his helm. It didn't come off the way his helm used to, nudged up out of the way as Impactor burrowed in to suck and kiss, but there was just enough room for the scrape of teeth, the slow drag of a tongue. Impactor's hands were as big as his torso, but it wouldn't have mattered if they were the same size. Megatron unfolded, knees already parting, back arching to open him up. To welcome his older, heavier, mismatched partner to join the party. Nipping teeth caught the nape of his neck and drew him upright, bringing him out of that instinctive curl.

Baring him to the light. He still did this with the lights dimmed low, didn't he? Pleasure had belonged in the dark, hidden and secret, and old habits apparently died hard.

"Guess some things never change," he muttered before Impactor could. Perhaps saying it out loud first neutralized the sting the words would have carried if said by someone else. Maybe it was simply a rueful admittance.

Either way, Impactor was lifting him up. In one hand. Shrinking to the size of a minibot made things more convenient for a one-handed mech. "Some things do."

Megatron grumbled something he didn't mean to be heard.

Impactor paused and looked at him strangely. "...did not."

"Did too."

"We left the lights off most the time!"

"Didn't matter. You just **had** to compare equipment." Megatron's systems hiccupped, and he shrank another frame size. He sighed. Impactor's hand was now large enough that he could lean back, carefully propping his elbows on the mech's wrist. His legs hung over the fingers. "Every single time, you had to measure my spike against yours and see how deep I was. It was your stupidest habit. I don't know what you expected to happen overnight, but my spike never got any shorter or my valve any deeper."

The strange look intensified. The fingers holding Megatron's aft shifted. "You..."

Megatron's optics narrowed. "What?" Was this because of the shrinking? Mass displacement wasn't _that_ uncommon.

A veteran of the Wreckers shouldn't wear the awkward expression of a miner on his first trip to the local brothel. Impactor couldn't hold Megatron's gaze, although he tried multiple times before looking at the wall, the recharge slab, even the ceiling. Megatron wasn't much for decorating his hab suite. Impactor didn't have much to look at before he had to turn back to the miniature mech now glaring at him suspiciously.

"What?"

"You...I just thought you knew," Impactor mumbled.

"Knew **what**?"

"I just, uh, liked." Impactor gestured with his harpoon arm. "Ya know. Foreplay. Gettin' my hands on ya. You never told me t' stop, so...just a bit of fun. I thought." The big tough miner version of playing at silly tickle fights with his lover.

Megatron started to answer and stopped, vocalizer engaged but no words queued. Static crackled softly. Years of memory rearranged in his head. What he'd assumed had been wrong, and it changed - it changed absolutely nothing in the present, but it made something painfully shift in his mind. Impactor had used to cradle their spikes in his hand, pressing them together as he eyed them like a critic, thumb rolling them back and forth, and press his drill gently into Megatron's valve, testing for depth. Every time, yet Megatron hadn't seen what he'd really been doing.

"You really never figured it out?" Impactor snorted, recovering his easy confidence. "Still got your head up your aft. You can see that 'big picture' of yours, but you can't see what's right in front of your face." He lifted his hand while Megatron was still composing an answer. "Not like me."

Combat reflexes jerked his face to the side, but the fingers beneath him closed to hold his body still. Megatron hissed in shock as a tongue ran down him, chest to knee, in a broad wet swathe. Hot metal swept over his spike, still erect. It ran and ran over him in an impossibly long laving of something unmistakably a tongue, but huge. He knew the feel, he'd felt it before, but there was a vast difference between the small slick tease of a mouth on his spike and...this. It never ended. It was a wall of firm pressure squishing him into Impactor's hand.

It stopped and licked back the way it'd come as soon as it reached his knees, and Megatron's hips rose to meet it without conscious thought on his part. The fingers under his aft boosted him into the tongue forcing his legs apart. The hands he'd brought up to defend his face braced against the underside of Impactor's jaw, but he didn't push away. No, he dug tiny fingers into unpolished metal and held on, using the leverage to stay in place as the fingers let him go. He ground into the tongue lapping down his body, and the hand he sat on shifted around feeling him up, like a miner trying to identify a strange piece of equipment in the dark.

His systems hiccuped.

Impactor paused and blinked. His mouth slowly closed as he looked down at the significantly smaller mech now sitting _in_ his hand. How small could mass displacement make a mech? "Huh."

Megatron sat up, scowling. "Not a word."

The corner of Impactor's mouth twitched. "Can't talk if my mouth's full."

"You still think you're funn **eeee** **?!** "

Shrilling at a pitch worthy of a startled Starscream wasn't his most dignified moment, but it wasn't every day he was _shoved in someone's mouth_. He was allowed to be surprised, fraggit!

He was too big to go all the way in, but Impactor had a big mouth. It occurred to him to comment on that, but he was waist-deep in a mouth and had more important things to think about.

Namely on the noisy suction going on beneath his chest. "Hwwr's thrrt?" Impactor slurred around his legs, and Megatron slammed a fist on what was nearest. Impactor's chin, since he was face-down at the moment.

"Stop talking!" And keep sucking, he meant, but Impactor understood him well enough.

The tongue pushing between his legs slurped loudly. Megatron braced his hands on Impactor's chin and tried to thrust against the wet slither of it, but Impactor wouldn't stop _moving_. The tiny mech chuffed out a frustrated breath and tried to push back, push more of himself inside, inching through Impactor's lips despite the soft slurping tongue threatening to wrap around him. He spread his legs until they pushed Impactor's cheeks out into twin bulges, and still he couldn't get the friction he needed. That tongue wouldn't stop lapping, poking, curling here, curving there, until Megatron could have screamed.

"Hold still!" he shouted at last.

Impactor snickered. A second later, Megatron's optics rounded. Teeth closed, just this side of too hard. The lips around his chest sealed tight, and -

 _Sluck!_

Megatron's optics unfocused, and he scrabbled at Impactor's lips and chin with shaking hands. His valve panel, already uncomfortably warm, opened involuntarily. His spike thrust frantically against the tongue pressed the full length of him at long last. It was a firm pressure molded along him, a shifting wet warmth pressed against every plate and seam of his body all at once. It held him pinned to the roof of Impactor's mouth. Impactor's cheeks hollowed as he pulled air down, creating a void, and Megatron swore by all Thirteen Primes that his sensor nodes were being pulled down into his interface array in a throbbing wave of suction. His spike emptied in long spurts he could feel in his _spark_. His valve pulsed in aching pleasure with every beat of his fuel pump, and still Impactor kept sucking.

 _Sluck!_

 _Slurch slurch sluck._

 _Schluuuuuuurch_.

Megatron's optic lenses skreeled down into pinpoints. He might have whimpered. Scratch that; he definitely whimpered. By the time Impactor's jaw got tired, the little silver mech leaked noises that didn't quite qualify as moans but had graduated from whimpers.

His systems had also hiccupped again. Impactor hooked a finger into his mouth to fish the shrunken mech out. He'd be below knee-height to Rewind at this point, if he could stand straight. Megatron didn't even try.

"This's ridiculous," Impactor said, studying the silver puddle panting heavily in his palm. "How small you gonna get before it resets?"

Megatron waved a hand vaguely. It could have meant anything, but it mostly meant he was too tired to answer. He'd just had his valve and spike sucked dry. That sinfully clever tongue had rubbed his oversensitive equipment to more overloads than he'd thought possible, huge and strong between his thighs while he squirmed helplessly between Impactor's teeth, surrounded and held in place in the mech's mouth. The sheer amount of pleasure pulled out of his body had exhausted him.

"Well, since you're the right size for it...ya mind givin' me a hand?"

Another wave. Whatever. As long as it didn't involve physical effort on his part for the next couple of minutes, Megatron was game for pretty much anything.

Impactor lowered him. "See if this works."

Works? Megatron brought one optic online just in time to see something he'd never thought he'd see again. It looked the same as he remembered it, if bigger. It made him sad, in a tired way old regrets wrung of feeling did when touched. He reached one hand to pet the rim, briefly nostalgic.

Impactor shuddered and shifted his grip to turn the tiny mech about. Cupped in giant fingers, Megatron sat sidelong to his valve, one leg folded under him and the other dropped off the side. When Impactor rolled his hips, the valve slid over Megatron from chin to foot. Megatron slumped into the curve of his hand and let it happen. Post-overload lethargy settled slowly. A passive role was the best he could muster, for now.

Minutes passed. Up above, metal tinked. A faint smile tugged at Megatron's lips. He remembered that sound. Impactor might have a harpoon in place of a drill, now, but it seemed his old fragbuddy still liked to play with his chest while interfacing. It'd always been an erotic sight. Big tough miner frametype fondling himself while Megatron ate him out? Few things in the universe were hotter.

Impactor rubbed him over the rim of his valve, rougher than before, and Megatron stretched, shaking off the lassitude. Time to do this.

He shuffled about until he sat in the curve of big fingers. It pressed his knees to the metal between valve and port. He kicked a foot and smirked when it earned a loud gasp from overhead. As tired as he felt, he had enough energy to do this.

He knocked his foot against metal, searching. It took him a moment to find what he was looking for by feel alone, but platelets clattered in a protective clench when his foot hit the right spot. He rolled his ankle joint, running the tip of his foot in an inward spiral. The edge of his foot slide over the flattened plating, but he could trace how they interlocked. He turned the spiral in the other direction.

It wasn't the stroke of a finger, but it worked much the same. Patient attention coaxed code-level defensive reaction into relaxing eventually. The platelets loosened.

Megatron eased the tip of his foot in, working with the gradual loosening. It was slow work, but exhaust ports weren't designed to let things _in_. That's generally why it took longer and felt far different to play with. He didn't kick so much as he walked, back and forth, letting his foot and leg move at the slow pace of Impactor's body.

While waiting, he set his hands to work as well. Impactor's valve would fit like an emergency escape pod, at this size. He could crawl up inside, if he had to, and he gave the idea due consideration. It'd be…different. Could be interesting. Now, how to do it..?

Megatron leaned forward, putting a little weight on the foot carefully wedged inside Impactor's port. He had enough of a foothold that he thought it could work. It didn't tense closed and push his foot out, so he risked standing up, balancing on one leg. That gave him the height to reach the top of the valve, and he grabbed hold.

The hand cupped around him jolted as he felt under the rim for the sensor node he knew was there. "Hnngh!"

"Still sensitive," he said idly. Most of his attention stayed on what he was doing. Fluttering his fingers over the node got him another strained grunt.

Charge tingled in the joints of his fingers, and the mechanisms of Impactor's valve expanded, opening for a spike it wasn't going to get. Slick metal clicked, reflecting the dim light under Impactor's hand in a hundred muted glints as interlocked parts shifted. Megatron smirked and felt around the side of the rim for a dense cluster. Impactor's gasp was muffled this time, but it was enough to tell him he'd found it. He closed his hands, feathering over the charge-swollen nodes. The hand around him tightened and opened, echoing his own hand's movement. Pet the nodes, and Impactor's hand went lax. Dig his fingertips in, and it went rigid.

He could smell the lubricant oozing from outlets behind the nodes. A few seconds later, warm, wet, thick liquid began to drip over his fingers. Dim light reflected from fluid as much as metal, now. He dragged his fingers through it, stroking it up and over the nodes until they were slick and hot.

Then he put his hands over them and _squeezed_.

Impactor's entire pelvic span jumped. Megatron's hands squiped off the nodes, lubricant-greased. A loud grunt from overhead made him grin, and he pawed at the nodes again. Again, he managed a fraction of a second of a hard grip before the charge-plumped nodes popped right out of his hands. Lubricant squirted from the outlets.

The hand holding him all but crushed him into the valve. Megatron's grin became a chuckle. That was one way to get inside. It was a tight fit, but he'd make do. He got his knee over the lower rim, deliberately crushing another cluster under his miniscule weight.

Unfortunately, a shallow pool of lubricant had collected, and he almost slid straight back out. Flailing for something to hang onto only succeeded in dragging his hands down the inside walls, which just made the problem _worse_. Lubricant gushed in spurting jets as Impactor overloaded, calipers cinching down around Megatron in a sudden shaking ripple.

The foot wedged in Impactor's port kept him from a full bellyflop into the sloshing stream now dribbling out of the valve, but it was a close thing. Megatron braced his hands and elbows into the moving parts clicking all around him and held on for the ride.

"Been a while since you got laid last?" he asked no one. It sure hadn't taken much to set Impactor off. Some tired groping and - yeah, tiny mech climbing inside a valve. That might have contributed to Impactor's short fuse.

"Messy." Not that Impactor was in any condition to hear him, but he felt like he should lodge some kind of protest for being wrist-deep in lubricant. Oh, well. Interfacing had never been a prim and proper activity back in the mines, either. At least here they didn't have grit shoved in unmentionable areas.

No, Impactor had _Megatron_ shoved in unmentionable areas.

He was enjoying it far more than he probably should be. Heh.

Megatron tried not to think about it as he wiggled his foot, stuffing it deeper into Impactor's port. He was a sopping mess of lube, but that was no reason to stop. He swished his hands around in the pool, feeling for the smooth half globes of sensor nodes. The nervous sensors for the valve surrounded it in a woven network that connected into a series of clusters around the rim. Every sensor node fed into that network, and the clusters studded thick insulated wire that conducted charge and data alike. The wires collected into the bundle at the lower rim of the valve and ran back up into a mech's spinal column.

If Megatron pushed _down_ on the sensor network at the same time he lifted _up_ with his foot, it'd sandwich that transmission bundle between them. The wires would meet the network and create a feedback loop. The exhaust port below would catch ghost echoes as roused charge conducted through metal. And if he did this right, he could create a building cycle. It'd be harder to do using a foot instead of a finger, but it's what he had to work with.

He shoved his foot further into the port, making sure he wouldn't slip out. It almost seemed to suck him deeper. His other foot, he deliberately toed into a cluster on the valve rim, pushing between the largest nodes.

"Hold onto your harpoon," he said and began rocking.

Lunge _forward_ , weight thrown on to his arms and heels of his hands kneading deep into the nodes under him. Rock violently _back_ , and his foot pointed to plunge in to the heel. Flex his foot down, catch his balance, and lunge _forward_ , chest splashing into the pool of lubricant as his forearms stropped over the sensor nodes moving under him. The valve tightened around him, the tight tunnel contracting as Impactor's hips rose in jerking thrusts at a counter-rhythm. Metal moved all around him, urgently pressing down around his shoulders.

Rock _back_ , the toe of his foot pulling up inside the port, a hard _lift_ to the roof of the exhaust pipe itself. Lunge _in_ , creating a wave of lube. Rock _back_. _In_ down _out_ up, _in_ down _out_ up, _in-in-indownout-out-outup_ , **_in_** _down **out** up!_

His systems hiccupped. Megatron yelped as he slipped on the backstroke, leg abruptly sinking up to the knee in Impactor's port. Impactor howled. The teensy mech lost his grip entirely and started to fall out -

 _Beep!_

Megatron made some combination of an alarmed yelp and a defiant yell. Impactor roared in pain and twisted pleasure. Metal screamed as it tore. Sparks flew, paint scorched, and the big Autobot overloaded in a spray of lubricant and energon.

Megatron ended up sprawled on the floor, one foot stuck up on the recharge slab, lodged at an awkward angle under Impactor. They both panted wildly, equally disoriented. The abrupt mass displacement reset had Megatron's equilibrium reeling. Impactor just had something far too large stuck up a port far too small to accommodate it. Neither one of them was ready to move yet, for entirely different reasons.

When things went wrong, it was inevitably at the wrong time, or in front of the worst person possible. Or _with_ him, in this case.

"This First Aid guy any good?" Impactor asked.

Megatron couldn't help but laugh.

* * *

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	4. Pt 3

**Title:** Miners  & Holes  
 **Warning:** Sex fantasies?  
 **Rating:** PG-13.  
 **Continuity:** IDW  
 **Characters:** Impactor/Megatron  
 **Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn't own the script or actors.  
 **Motivation (Prompt):** Prewar miners + _"Impactor's back._ _"_

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 **Part 2.5**

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Impactor marveled over Megatron's casual possession of light, down here in the dark, but most of Megatron's use of it passed unnoticed. He wrote his poetry late into their off shifts, while Impactor rolled over and conked out like clockwork, determined to wring the most rest possible from the hours. Anybody looking into their slot would see the big silver miner hunched over on his bunk, face lit from the tablet held in his hands, the lines of his expression tense as he concentrated on word choice. In the opposite bunk, the darkness would hold the loud, snoring frame of his shift partner, hidden in the shadows made somehow a denser black by the light Megatron held.

Except sometimes, the light illuminated Impactor instead. The tablet blared its optic-hurting blue-white light, but it was held out toward the other bunk by a careful hand, a hand ready to fumble it back into an _'I was writing, yup, I sure was'_ position at the slightest hint of Impactor waking. The light would blind the other miner for a crucial second, but Megatron didn't want to be caught looking by anyone. He couldn't count the number of times he'd whipped the tablet around just in time. Curious optics peered into the slot as miners passed, and Megatron seemed absorbed in his writing.

As soon as they were past, however, he turned the light toward his partner. Shift partner, slotmate, occasional lover, and friend, but Megatron couldn't identify the mech without using his hands in the dark. He hadn't been down underground long enough to hear the subtle difference between a dozen other similar frametypes, pick out the right set of red optics bobbing along in a formless crowd of miners comfortably walking along in the total black. He could, in the rare silences between shifts as handlers signed off and heavy digging equipment idled, hear a particular gait coming up behind him and know that was how Impactor alone walked.

He would learn the differences the longer he worked in the dark. Impactor's swagger would become as familiar to him as the constant background noise, part of his everyday life, and he'd know the difference between individual creaks and sighs depending on Impactor's moods. Frag, he'd know the shape of their supervisor's optics after another three months down here, and he only saw the mech at the beginning and end of the shift. He saw Impactor's optics most of the shift. Their shape would soon slide into the back of his mind to lodge in his longterm memory, knowledge he didn't know he'd internalized permanently until one day far in the future he'd glance across a battlefield and know who the brawler in the shadow of the downed assault vehicle was, despite the darkness.

Experience would ingrain that in him. For now, he was still a newbie miner curious about the details he'd felt but couldn't actually describe.

He couldn't just _ask_ Impactor for this. Miners didn't let each other explore kibble and study the hard lines of their bodies. It was barely acceptable to sneak more than a grope during interfacing. Megatron had felt up Impactor's back plenty during their clanging, in one position or another, but there was a world of difference between a patchwork mental picture made of hurried stolen caresses and a detailed examination of the subject at hand. Or at optic, as the case might be, as Megatron didn't dare reach out to feel for himself the piece of back armor that became the top of Impactor's altmode. He wanted to slide his hand around the narrow waist, feeling out its power as if he could prove to himself that it wasn't as tiny as it looked in contrast to Impactor's thick hips and broad upper body. It was a visual illusion, one belied by what he felt in the darkness when they fragged. He had to look twice in the light.

He hadn't realized the support hydraulics of Impactor's altmode tucked into slots on his back until he saw them in the light. They were well-concealed. Megatron hadn't felt them while clawing Impactor's back during their fragging, but he'd crept as close as he could risk to memorize their location in the light. He'd held the tablet up and _looked_ at the rough metal of a career miner, and Impactor had groaned a strangled, incredulous curse the next time they clanged. The hydraulics turned out to be sensitive if teased out and pumped. Megatron squeezed them in his hands as he stretched them out to their full extensions before a sudden release, Impactor curling over him to gasp at the jolt of pleasure.

Megatron liked having that sort of advantage over Impactor. At least in fragging, he wasn't being shown the ropes. He knew how things worked in a good hard frag. Life underground felt foreign and strange still, but the playing field was level for interfacing. He'd shown Impactor a thing or two.

Of course, then Impactor pulled out some dirty tricks of his own, but Megatron was hardly going to complain about _that._

It wasn't just about fragging. Megatron turned light on Impactor in the dark in order to truly see him, but it was more than that. His hands caught on rough metal covered in old dents and dings, normal wear and tear from grit Impactor's drill backblast, but seeing the minor damage registered it as more significant in Megatron's mind. A sickening lurch of sympathy jumped his tanks, a profound rage that Impactor would never have the healthcare coverage to seek a medic's advice on the chronic ache so many small problems added up to, an unhappy determination to draw attention to the lack of sufficient safety equipment provided by the mining company. He wanted to _change_ what he saw in the light. He wanted to force the world to right its wrongs, until Impactor no longer bore the bruises and scars miners took for granted. Cybertron hid them underground, out of sight and out of mind. Megatron wanted to bring them to light.

The sight of Impactor's back inspired a need for justice in Megatron. It also stirred desire in the depths of his systems. His breathing deepened. His fuel pump cycled faster. The longer he stared, the more his optics dwelled on how Impactor laid instead of the raw scrapes in purple and yellow paint. He wanted to get up and join him, the longer the light lingered. The tablet moved slowly down the length of the slumbering miner's body, and lust inevitably rose in Megatron mind, the burgeoning words addressed to his fellow workers turning to more heated poetry meant for private audiences.

"Tryin' to sleep," Impactor muttered whenever the words grew too strong to resist, but the tight grip on his waist and tangle of their open mouths usually persuaded him that carnal pursuits were a better use of his bunk.

On off-shifts that Megatron resisted, Impactor turned over and squinted across the aisle between their bunks. "Don't you ever get tired of lookin' at that thing?"

And Megatron, still scribbling feverish verse, smiled into the light of his tablet.

* * *

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 **[* * * * *]**

 _"Impactor - catscratches_ _"_

 **[* * * * *]**

* * *

"So tell me somethin'," Impactor said, because the best time for a conversation was clearly while he had his partner pinned facedown, chest splayed open against the rough surface of the bunk.

Megatron groaned protest, but Impactor leaned a bit more weight on him. The low growling groan turned into a throaty, slurred plea for _harder._ The miner currently on top grinned, savoring his position and the power therein. It wouldn't last, but might as well gloat while he had it.

"You listening?" he asked his partner.

Megatron gathered his composure enough to bite out a sharp curse. Metal squealed as Impactor planted his knees and thrust his chest in a peculiar forward circling motion. It pushed Megatron along for the ride, which was where the metal-on-metal noise came from as his open chest met the bunk. Black hands spasmed in Impactor's grip, fingers curling. His partner had scratched his finish so many times doing that, Impactor had finally wised up. Grabbing Megatron's wrists right away when they fragged kept the scratching to a minimum, plus wrestling about to keep his grip revved them both up as a bonus.

Megatron's optics flashed so brightly they reflected off the rusty support struts for the bunk above them. They brightened further as Impactor _pushed_ with all his weight behind it. A grating noise replaced the squeal of metal as he flattened Megatron entirely, Impactor's chest pushing him into the bunk to really give the silver miner's spark chamber the heavy, grinding attention it deserved. Megatron's mouth fell open in a soundless shout, optics flickering like a strobe light. If they were loose, the lenses inside would have been rolling back into his head.

Impactor smirked as he canted his head down to see. Watching closely, he gave another two thrusts. Optics brilliant-bright, Megatron bucked in time, bruising his own spark chamber against the bunk.

His partner, being a glitch with a sadist's perfect timing, waited until the last second to suddenly push up, releasing him in a blatant tease. Comparatively cold air flushed down his back. Megatron, of course, made an angry static noise like everyone on the mine tunnels losing radio signal at once. It spat frustration. It promised violence.

Impactor bent forward over him, back bowed to keep his heavy mass out of reach. He hovered against Megatron's back in a delicious temptation, just an answer away from covering him again. "I said, you listening?"

Legs kicked. Wrists twisted. Megatron went nowhere. All he succeeded in doing was squirming against the looming hulk refusing to finish him off. He could _feel_ Impactor being smug at him. "Yes," he grated at last.

"Good." Impactor knocked his chest against Megatron's back lightly as a reward, and pleasure choked the snarl in his friend's throat. "So tell me this: why'm I younger than you, but I've been down here longer? We're both manual class. You should'a been shipped out to a mine just like me the minute you came online, but I had to teach you practically everything." He pushed, deliberate and slow, and Megatron's angry denial - he wasn't that fresh a newbie! - cut off in a very appreciative groan for the pressure scraping his open chest on the bunk. "So where'd you go after you came online? A library?" Wouldn't surprise him. He'd never seen a miner bury his head in literature before, but it took throwing his partner down on the bunk to get him to put the poetry aside.

"I - ohhh, frag, do that - do that again."

He bumped his chest to Megatron's back in a few teasing nudges. "I'm waiting."

"So am I!"

Impactor's knees squeaked from mine dust as he sat up, threatening without a word. Megatron slammed his forehelm down on the bunk, growling, and Impactor chuckled nastily at his frustration. They both knew Megatron could finish himself off, not easily with his hands trapped by Impactor's fists, but he could do it. He just didn't want to, not with Impactor straddling his aft, the thick bulk of him so close their fields overlapped.

"I don't know," Megatron said at last, voice uneven. "They had me in labs for months. Years. They ran tests on me I don't even have names for, and they never told me why. My spark's - " Wariness filled the optic turned to look up at Impactor. "Nevermind."

There was a hardness in his voice, stubborn denial in his field, and Impactor knew about bad history. He nodded in response to the wary look without knowing what he was agreeing to, only that it was the right response for that kind of personal junk. Mechs told only what they wanted to, down here in the dark. Digging up dirt on somebody wasn't a miner's job. Miners didn't care about each other's pasts. They cared about fair ore weights, decent supervisors, repaired equipment, and reliable partners. They lived day-by-day, always in the present, not by the past.

If they talked about it, they whispered from mouth to audio, secrets told to trusted friends, identities protected by the dark. It wasn't pried from the walls like energon from a hidden vein. People didn't come here to be recognized. They disappeared into the mines, staying down where everybody looked the same with the lights off.

Truth came out like wounds down here: hidden under the surface, hinted at by glimpses in passing, but only exposed up in the light.

So Impactor didn't need to know. He wanted to know, curious as he was, but it was Megatron's business. "What'd you do sitting 'round labs all day?" he said instead, snorting contempt. It invited a tangent into complaining about stupid little things instead of anything important. "Sounds boring."

"You have no idea." Megatron turned his head away, echoing the contempt, but his field rang relief. "They didn't have me do anything. I honestly believe they didn't even think about what I did outside of their tests. Once I was out of sight, they probably thought I sat in my room staring at a wall like an automaton."

"Walls are **exciting**."

The sarcasm got a laugh, at least. "Sure they are. I spent enough time staring at those walls we probably count as amica, but no. A doctor gave me a tablet and forgot to take it back. I downloaded half the infonet onto it out of sheer boredom. They never caught on that I was buying literature on their bill."

Of course the nerd downloaded books. He got off on words, Impactor could swear it. He'd probably overload on the spot if someone regaled him with classic poetry. "Tell me you used the lab's access account to buy dirty vids."

The small restless motions under Impactor stopped dead. "No, but I should have," Megatron said after a second of obviously picturing that.

Impactor snickered, and after a second, Megatron joined him. They had a good laugh imagining some stuffy accountant finding that entry.

It clicked over in Impactor's head, however. "Waaaaait, who taught you to read?" he asked. He'd always wondered, but some mechs were brought online with the programming installed for instant access like that. He'd sort of assumed Megatron was one of those mechs, but it didn't make any sense the longer he thought about it.

"A med assistant. He got tired of having to read me the instructions for every test." Megatron rutted futilely against the bunk, spark chamber clanking. His patience for questions had long run dry. "Are you done playing junior inquisitor, cogsucker? We take any longer and the next shift's going to think they're invited."

Sounded like a good idea to him, but then again, maybe not. Impactor didn't particularly want to share his partner, not that he'd ever say that out loud. "Getting' impatient?" he asked, bearing down, and Megatron's moody huff turned into a low moan.

Metal started a rhythmic scrape, this time uninterrupted.

* * *

 **[* * * * *]**


	5. Pt 4

**Title:** Miners & Holes

 **Warning:** Sex. Piercings and associated grossness.

 **Rating:** NC-17

 **Continuity:** IDW

 **Characters:** Impactor/Megatron

 **Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn't own the script or actors.

 **Motivation (Prompt):** _Realism and nipple piercings Impactor/Megatron commission for Baiku. Piercings seem to have become a fetish for people in this fandom, which amuses me immensely._

* * *

 **[* * * * *]**

 **Pt. 4**

 **[* * * * *]**

* * *

This was already one of the strangest nights out they'd had together. When Impactor said he had a plan and some shanix to blow, Megatron had already been in. He usually was. Impactor's plans regularly ended in Megatron curled up in a defensive ball under a table somewhere, but what were friends for if not tag along and post bail money at midnight?

Reality, however, was far different than expectation. "We passed the bar," he said blankly, half-turning to look back.

Impactor sniggered. "I know."

"Are we going to a different bar?"

"Nope."

"I already told you I don't have money for the lighthouse."

"We ain't goin' to the brothel."

Well, that was more disappointing than not. He didn't have money to buy someone shiny and warm, but the lighthouse had a bar. He'd complain about it, but waiting for Impactor to get his bolts off wasn't a bad way to spend surface time. Staring at gilded shareware while drinking was a time-honored tradition among the manual classes.

Passing the turn-off for the brothel nixed that idea, however. There wasn't anything else of interest on this road. The XXX shows were down the same street as the bar. "Engex store?" he asked after some thought. "I'm not helping you smuggle bottles past the lift guard." He wouldn't mind grabbing cheap bottles of engex as long as Impactor had a place for them to crash after drinking. The Enforcers around here let public intoxication offenders pass for bribe money in return, money he didn't have.

His buddy tossed a grin over one wide shoulder. "Only if you're buying. I gotta save my shanix."

"For what?" Megatron threw his hands up, lengthening his stride to catch up. To the Pit with tamely following Impactor around. "You've been saying that for three paydays! What're you saving up for, a full detailing at the Grand Plaza?" The miners spoke in glowing terms of the gleaming hotel in downtown Rodion, promising in their cups that next time, _next time_ , they save up and buy the Senate treatment. It was a slag-iron hope nobody confessed to while sober. Megatron and every other miner knew they'd never make it past the doormech. The Grand Plaza's security would take one look at their battered plating and pitch them out onto road outside so fast they'd be ticketed for speeding. It wouldn't matter if they held a fistful of shanix, ready to pay. They didn't fit the Grand Plaza's all-important _image_.

"I," Impactor announced as Megatron drew equal to him, flashing him a grin more giddy than tough, "am getting a mod installed."

That didn't seem exciting. Megatron blinked at him before shrugging. "New headlights?" Miners got power boosters wired into their bulb sockets all the time.

The grin widened. "Nope. A **real** install. A piercing, none of that pre-mold frame add-on scrap." Megatron's optics faded pink around the edges, but his queasiness went unnoticed by his hyped-up friend. Impactor gushed, "A drilled, wired, reprogrammed install! Bullbars, right here," he thumped himself in the chest, fists clanging against the lower rims of his storage rack. "Punch through underneath and lock 'em in up front. Think about it, eh?" Elbowing the other miner, he turned his grin filthy. "Presentation, right? People gotta get their hands on stuff that looks off-limits, and mods are supposed to be more sensitive than built-in metal. Cage my cables, make 'em harder to get at, and bam, greedy hands'll be grabbing for 'em in no time." He cupped his hands underneath the racks and spread his fingers in front of the hatches like a security gate over a shop window. "None of this action's free," he said in gruff imitation of Mediclav. "Pay for access, you ingrates!"

Impactor laughed, big and loud, and dropped the snooty medical attendant's accent. "Oughta be good for handlebars, if nothin' else. Can you imagine?" He mimed working a spike in each hand in front of his chest, handjobs in stereo, and Megatron's optics paled from the frames inward.

This time, Impactor noticed. "Huh? What's with that look?"

"Nothing."

The curt excuse failed to convince. Suspicious, Impactor sidestepped to jostle his pal as they walked. "What? You got a problem with mods?"

"No!" Megatron reset his vocalizer. "I mean, no. Not mods. Just…" One hand unconsciously rose to cup over the back of his neck. They kept walking, but the silver miner couldn't meet his friend's optics. "Needles."

"Huh?"

"Needles! I don't like them, okay? I've heard rumors." He glanced around as if the mere word had summoned government agents to jump out of the alleys and grab him. Subversive idealists writing in the dark were vulnerable out here in the neon lights of the surface world. The shadow forums on the infonet circulated rumors of vanished people, people who spoke too freely about the very things Megatron wrote about. He hadn't published anything yet, but neither had some of the missing activists.

Fortunately for his jittery nerves, his friend feared no rumor unless it was about the bar watering its brews. "Pshhaw! Needles. What kinda mech are you, a Senator? Oh nooooo, it's a neeeeeeedle. It might **mar** my precious paaaaaint," Impactor whined, pressing the back of his hand to his helm as he pretended to feel faint.

Megatron cocked an incredulous look at him for using a word well above his paygrade, and Impactor cast his optics downward to invoke Primus as he flung an arm around the nerd's shoulders. It was half companionable reassurance and half capture. A token struggle to escape got Megatron nowhere. Impactor cheerfully dragged him along anyway. "I'm the one gettin' poked, and it's just a hole. Piercing, program adjustment, ta-daa! New plaything." He used his free hand to grope himself, leering suggestion of what kind of play he expected. "Won't hurt you any."

"I don't really want to **see** it, either."

"Ya need something to calm your nerves, your Senatorness?" Impactor teased, steering them toward a shabby corner store. It couldn't be told apart from any of the other corner stores in the area. The miners in Rodion could shop at these places with their optics off, and considering the quality of merchandise stocked, turning off their optics might actually help.

Megatron already knew to take a right inside the door, heading for the engex shelves. "You want to mooch off my bottle."

"Like you ain't grabbed mine the second I look away."

A fair point. Megatron put an exasperated front but didn't protest buying the cheapest bottle of engex available. He had the money for drinking, and it'd soothe his nerves enough to stop seeing mnemosurgeons in the shadows.

Cheap meant potent but terrible tasting, which was absolutely fine for their purposes. "Primus, not sure I can taste anything," Impactor said when he came up for air. His optics unfocused for a split second.

Megatron tipped back for an equally large swallow. "Euurgh, I can," he coughed in the aftermath. "Don't open your nasal intakes, trust me."

Impactor trusted him plenty, but he should have known better than to phrase is that way. Curiosity would kill the miner yet. "Aaaaugh, it's evaporating!"

"Told you." He slung back another gulp.

By now, his arm was around Impactor's waist, his friend's arm comfortably resting around his own, drill nestled into the dip where torso met waist. It fit oddly well there, a custom-fit they never talked about but went ahead and took advantage of any time they could get away with. Like now. Nobody looked twice at two miners hanging off each other while drinking. Miners who didn't hang off each other ended up slumped in the gutter, after all. Sure, Impactor's arm squeezed him in closer than mere companionable balance required, drill giving an occasional turn grinding into the sensitive joint, but it was for balance. Megatron intentionally bumped his hip every step, thumb idly smoothing over the exposed portion of Impactor's major transformation joint, but it was for balance. They were very balanced. The most balanced miners were they.

It was difficult to remain wary of the shadows when they were pushing each other into the darkest ones for heated make-outs. At some point, Megatron forgot why they were even out to this end of Rodion. Being on his knees, Impactor's broad pelvic span hiding him from anyone looking down the alley, seemed like a reason in and of itself.

So it was disorienting to tumble in the door to the piercing studio at last. It didn't help that they were both revved up and a bit overcharged, leaning against each other as they traded wild stories. "Ah hahah, and then Carryback sat on the weights, you remember tha - oooo, engravings!" Immediately distracted by bright biolights, Megatron abandoned Impactor to go investigate the example pictures on the walls. "Think I'd look any good with scrollwork on my chest?"

Impactor grinned after his friend, unsurprised by the sudden wide-optic admiration of the shinies. Miners attracted to lights was a given, even if the miner in question was practically a newbie, still. Leaving Megatron to dream, he swaggered up to the counter. "Yo! Here for a mod installation! Who's your best?"

Their best turned out to be somebody more modification than original metal. This was Impactor's kind of guy.

Five minutes later, Megatron tore himself away from the wall to rejoin his buddy. "I want them all," he grumbled as he shouldered in next to Impactor.

The skeevy, mottle-faced mech leaning on the other side of the counter flashed him a grin. It left a sheen of oil on Megatron's plating. "You want something done, we've got an opening tonight. You and your pal can get done together. Nice night out."

Megatron blinked at him and took refuge behind the half-empty bottle of hooch. That was far too many knobbly-ended mods on one mech for his comfort zone. And he seemed to have his piercing tools permanently installed instead of a hand. Hooks were well and good, but that thing didn't look even remotely sterile. It sent all kinds of alarms off in Megatron's head, mostly to do with hygiene.

"I, uh, thought you weren't supposed to get any sort of repair programming done while overenergized," he said. The bottle was brandished to ward off any more offers.

Impactor looked up from pointing down into the equipment case to give Megatron a superior look. "Lockdown here says it helps lower firewalls, so smelt that. I want another drink," he said as he took a grab at the bottle.

"No! Get your own!" Hugging the bottle, Megatron backed away.

Lockdown's smile had too many teeth. Half of them had to be extra installations, and some of them had black-iron additions punched through them, already oxidizing to rust-red as he bared them at Megatron. "You ask me," he purred to Impactor, but his optics blazed mocking challenge at, "he's just scared."

Megatron scowled. He'd heard this too many times to rise to the bait. "I'm not **scared**. Caution doesn't equate to fear."

Lockdown smirked. "Hear that, folks?" he called back into in the artist studios. "We got ourselves a 'cautious' customer."

"Scaaaaaaaaredy," catcalled back.

He refused to be goaded into action. That was what people expected of the manual class: all emotion circuitry, no brain modules. Megatron's first violent reflex was tempered by thought, and thought sent his powerplant rumbling deep bass anger at the sleezy, grease-stained mod-head. Anger burned the engex faster, blurring reflexes at the same time it sped brain module processor speed. He overcompensated as he straightened up, but his mind flashed through half-remembered memory files in a quick scan for important details.

"Where's your license?" he demanded, authority pulling around his shoulders like a cloak.

Lockdown failed to be impressed. He snorted his contempt at the miner attempting to stare him down. "Don't need a license to operate in Rodion."

"So you're saying you don't have one."

"Naw, I'm sayin' I don't need one."

"No, you're saying you don't **have** one. Or you wouldn't be so quick to say I'm scared instead of just showing me you're qualified." Megatron stuck his chin out and looked down his nose. "Hack."

Lockdown bristled, all his installed spikes suddenly looking sharper and more dangerous, but Impactor swiveled, one elbow resting on the display case as he squinted at his friend. " **What** license?"

"It's nothing."

"It's something," Megatron insisted. He lurched, catching his balance, but got his hand on Impactor's back to guide him in toward his friend's audio. "Programming license. For getting into your self-repair subroutines and that stuff. He doesn't have one."

Impactor peered up at him, elbow still on the case. "Yeah, so?"

Megatron huffed and clonked him on the helmhawk with the engex bottle. "He's a hacker, Impactor. He'll probably screw up your firewalls and give you a virus."

"Now that's just rude," Lockdown said as he glared at the silver miner. "You sure got a runaway mouth for a coward." Stepping around the counter, he put his hand and hook on his hips and pursed his lips into a sneer. "Go ahead and say that again. I know you won't."

It was just another version of the goading, pushing to win an argument through a fight. The mech couldn't win through facts, so he wanted to provoke Megatron into a fight inside the studio, where the other mod-artists would probably come to his defense, and then Lockdown would smirk and claim he'd won the argument despite the fight having nothing to do with whether or not he had a legitimate license. That was the problem with violence. It didn't prove anything except who was stronger, but in the short-term, without thinking about it closely, it substituted for logic.

Megatron wouldn't participate in such a farce. Plus he wasn't stupid enough to throw a punch at a mech in his home territory.

He stuck to a bleary glare, and Lockdown's upper lip peeled up in gloating triumph. "That's what I thought. How's about you go sit your 'fraidy aft down in the corner while me and my client talk real mod business?"

Whatever Lockdown had expected, it wasn't Impactor pushing away from the counter as if repelled. "How's 'bout not." One arm caught Megatron around the waist again, keeping the nerd close as Impactor coincidentally stepped between him and Lockdown. "Don't know anything 'bout a license or scrap, but I ain't liking the vibe. We're outta here."

"And I ain't your anything," he spat at Lockdown as he pushed Megatron out the door.

The street outside seemed unnaturally quiet.

Megatron snuck worried glances at the black cloud of bad mood brooding beside him. Impactor stumped along wearing the expression Megatron was used to seeing on his face right before he picked a fight with someone well past his weight class.

Apologies didn't come easily out of people like them. They kind of sidled up to it, avoiding the associated mushy, vulnerable feelings by banishing direct words from their vocabularies. Megatron hesitated a long while and finally decided to just offer the bottle.

Impactor looked at it sidelong but didn't take it. "That thing about the drinking true?" he grumbled.

"Uh..." The first buzz of energy had burnt off, making Megatron's processors muddled in the aftermath. He strained to think straighter than he was walking. "S'what I heard."

"Fragging Pit," Impactor swore at a mumble, and he pushed the bottle aside. "Fine. Let's find a better place. That studio smelled like burnt wires anyway." Which was Impactor-speak for, _'Let us forget about what just happened forthwith, my esteemed colleague, for I desire not to speak or think closely upon it.'_

"Right. 'kay." Megatron grinned goofily as the arm still around his waist pulled him along. Forgiveness acquired. On with the night out.

In the end, they finally got the bright idea to look up reviews on the infonet. Mostly because Megatron had a tablet and was attempting to look like he was reading it while casually leaning against his friend's side. Impactor, who happened to have stuffed a few fingers up his valve from behind, wasn't fooled. But part of the fun of fragging in public was getting away with it under everyone's noses, so he set his chin on Megatron's shoulder to watch attentively while the nerd tried to run a search. The slow curl of his fingers was making that a bit difficult.

"You'd think people would have better online ads," Megatron said between muted gasps. Impactor snickered and wiggled his fingers. Tight, wet warmth went tighter yet but so much slicker, and Megatron's powerplant roared. A passerby gave the pair of miners a puzzled look, but the tablet in Megatron's hands was likely the cause of his confusion, not the noise. Miners tended to be noisy. Most of the manual class didn't own tablets, however, much less study them with such intent expressions.

It took some time to track down a decent piercing studio, even after Megatron turned his full attention to the search. Studios with licensed programmers working advertised it, but businesses in Rodion got by on word-of-mouth and bribes slipped to Enforcers. A licensed programmer made a studio stand out from the illegal, grungy studios operating out of bar basements, but too much advertising brought official attention, the kind that shut a place down.

"Huh," Impactor said as they trekked out to the right studio. "Seems like way too much effort for mods like this. Could probably do it myself if I got a - "

"I will move to a different slot if you buy needles," Megatron said, dead level.

Impactor looked at him, obviously trying to decide how serious he was. He looked pretty serious. One hand clapped over the back of his neck, protecting the area exposed by his helmet, and the other fisted at his side. Megatron looked ready to march right back to the mine to move out any second.

"...I got a drill?"

Megatron looked at Impactor's drill. He looked at Impactor's face. Behold how convinced he was not. See also: not amused in the least.

"Alright, alright, won't hurt to go talk to the professional. S'not like I can't take a little pain, y'know."

Megatron continued to be unamused. "How do I," he said as he caught Impactor's elbow to haul him into the piercing studio, "know more about mod installation than you? You can't just stab yourself and stick something in the hole. Self-repair would reject that in a day, and then you'd probably get metal degrading around the hole, and flaking, and paint discoloration, and frame warping, and internal leakage if you catch something, or node damage if you go through a nerve wire, or numbness from low-grade constant self-repair activity, or metal adaptation of the new mod weakening your own metal, and what happens if your repair systems start rejecting **all** your mods just because they're not the metal this one is? You ever think of that?"

Impactor hadn't. Megatron's list of problems lit a dim bulb of caution in the back of his mohawked helm, but it became a full-on floodlight of unlooked for concerns by the time the mod-artist finished telling him about all the excruciatingly terrible ways self-piercing could go wrong. There were pictures. They were gruesome, and not in a fun, action-movie kind of way. Megatron insisted on shoving them into his face.

"So I won't do it myself, fine," he muttered at his friend. "Enough already."

Megatron looked less friendly by the minute. "Oh, by the moons, **did you see this one?** "

Warned by the revolted fascination filling Megatron's face, Impactor leaned away. "No. Stop showing me that slag." He batted at the tablet. "Stoppit!"

"You could rust from the inside-out, Impactor! Rust! Why do you want to do this to yourself?"

Impactor smacked the nerd on the back of the helm with one hand and stole his tablet with the other. It seemed like sufficient answer. "Go look at the light engravings, geek."

The horrible pictures were less of an issue than the mod-artist laying out how installation really worked. Everything was turning out to be more expensive, take longer, and have worse consequences than anticipated, and Impactor was so out of his depth. "Wait, why do I gotta get these things first?" He poked the studs on the counter.

"Don't touch those," the piercer said sharply. "I just sterilized them."

They had to be sterilized? "Sorry?" Impactor almost asked, staring at the guy somewhat helplessly. He'd had no idea it took so much time and effort to get stabbed. The cost had already gone way over what he'd set aside, and he was dipping into his emergency funds to pay for this. He'd better not get into an accident in the mines until next payday, or he'd be in trouble.

"It takes twenty-five minutes to run all the necessary equipment through the autoclave," he was informed as the piercer moved the studs to a tray further away from Impactor's need to prod and poke. "I'll get your signature on the sterilization slip before and after. It changes color to show it went through. Once I've measured and marked you, I'll sterile-wipe the area where I'm piercing you, and we'll run a hardline during the process so I can get into your repair subroutines. It'll take about an hour to finish the tweaking to self-repair, depending on how much we do tonight. I'll lay the foundation program work for accepting and integrating the bullbars, but you can't put them in until the hole edges scar over and heal, or the circuitry will keep trying to establish connections and reject anything you put in." He eyed Impactor severely. "Seriously, mech. Don't take the studs out until you're healed, or you'll lose the holes. Got it?"

The miner blinked at him.

The dull look in his optics earned a sparkfelt appeal to Primus' grace from the mod-artist. _Miners._ "Yeah, okay, remember that for later. Tonight I'll pierce you, then clean you up afterward, spray a solvent over it, and send you on your way. What **you** need to do is keep the area clean until the open edges of the hole heal over. I'll give your self-repair new directives, but it takes time for programming to settle in, and it won't do a thing for hygiene, so you get on that slag or you're going to lose your investment. Any problems are covered on here," he shoved a flimsy at Impactor, eyed the miner's bewildered expression, and grabbed it back to give to Megatron. Now that was a miner who'd come prepared. It looked like he'd been taking notes throughout the whole lecture, which pleased the mod-artist. Maybe this wouldn't just be a waste of time and money for this Impactor guy.

Admittedly, what the piercer didn't know was that Megatron's notes had more to do with the cadence of the instructions than the content. There was a peculiar measure to the habitual delivery that had captivated Megatron's interest, a sort of poetry to the beat he couldn't help but try and capture.

The smudged, much-copied list of aftercare was more important, however, and Megatron reluctantly put away his tablet. He knew Impactor. He knew they'd never be read if he trusted his fellow miner to hold onto the flimsy.

Impactor, of course, had fixated on one part of the spiel and completely ignored the rest. "But I want bullbars, not studs."

Megatron shared a look with the mod-artist. Unknown to either of them, it was the same look Impactor exchanged with the bartender every time Megatron started in on complaining that the bar didn't have an open mic night.

"The bars are too heavy," the mod-artist repeated tiredly. "They'll pull out within a month, or reject as your repair systems override my programming to dump the weight-stress. Repair nanites make weld-scars out of metal slurry; put too much weight on the setting nanites, and the scars will buckle instead of firm. At best, the underside of your chest would end up stretched out, big puckered holes that keep stretching out instead of healing. Studs are just the first step, inert metal to resist integration but promote nanite firming. Once the holes are sealed, you can bolt in heavier mods with compatible circuitry plugs, or even spot-weld permanent installations in."

Impactor took a moment to absorb that. Reality and his lack of patience didn't mix well, but the nerd was nodding as if it all made sense, and Impactor figured he'd know. "Will they be sensitive?" he asked, changing subject slightly.

The piercer eyed his chest, considering it. "They won't be, not unless you get the bullbars wired in, but the area around them should be plenty touchy. Until self-repair cools down, the whole area's going to have higher voltage running through its nervous system wires. And we're talking about punching up through under your cables. Even if you don't plug in a mod later, studs'll press into a sensor-dense area. Most mechs say they feel it when partners play with their mods." A teasing wink at Megatron conveyed exactly whom he thought said partner would be, and he wasn't wrong.

Megatron busied himself reading the aftercare sheet. "We're going to have to buy inert solvent tonight," he said.

The mod-artist laughed. "You want to come back with us and watch me work? I'll have to keep the door shut," he told Impactor. "I'm going to be wrist-deep in your storage rack, and I don't know who else is going walk in the studio tonight. Don't want to give everybody a free show."

"Yeah, su - waaaaait." The floodlight in Impactor's head spun dizzyingly away from gross images of infection to the implication of that statement. "Show? What kind of show? How far back you plannin' on punching these things?" Without thinking about it, he raised his hands to defend his chest.

Megatron lowered the flimsy to give his friend an exasperated _Weren't You Listening?_ look. Impactor had this habit of only hearing what he wanted to hear. In all likelihood, it explained why the other miner tolerated his poetry recitals so well, but still. Annoying habit, that.

Head tipped to the side to see under Impactor's hands, the piercer gestured to well back beyond his fingers. "Bullbars are heavy, mech. We're going to have to do this **deep** if you want a chance at these healing right. Eight gauge at the very least to heal right and support the kind of weight you want." Impactor slid his hands under his chest, almost cradling them, and the mod-artist nodded. "Yeah, way back there. I'll have to find the best spot once you open up and I can get in. I need to see where your cables connect before I mark the spot."

Impactor stared, optics round as he processed that, but Megatron choked on nothing. Somehow, in all the talking they'd done about this tonight, it hadn't quite hit the silver mech that this mod was essentially installed inside Impactor's storage rack. It wasn't quite a spike or valve piercing, but it was pretty slagging close. Impactor's storage rack held his interface cables, coiled up in his chest ready to connect to directed machinery down in the mines.

Equipment direction was the official purpose of interface cables, but the manual class had a long, sly, and wonderfully lewd tradition of using them off-duty for far more fun recreational activities. The upper classes considered jacking in nothing but base machine fucking. There was a huge scandal in the tabloids anytime a Senator was caught hooked up to shareware. Cables outside of work were 'dirty.'

And Impactor was getting mods installed with no real purpose other than making them sexier.

Megatron couldn't help but picture in much greater detail just what was happening tonight, and the very crudeness made it that much hotter. Disturbingly hot, because in order to put the mods in, Impactor would be splayed open under the piercer's hands like a helpless prisoner being tortured.

"I'm making an engex run," he croaked, mouth dry, and abruptly stood. "You want anything?"

"Huh?" Impactor said, but Megatron was out the door and away.

He didn't actually want to keep the overcharge going, although he spent a long time dithering in front of the engex shelves in the corner store down the street. Taking bottles down one by one, he read the backs with more care than a list of ingredients and filtration facts merited. The more time he wasted, he felt, the better. Anything to keep him out of that studio, with the piercer, and the needles, and the casual talk of reprogramming parts of a mech, and the hands in intimate areas. He knew how he felt about those things separately, but the combination just confused his libido.

Honestly, he kind of wanted to watch. His tanks lurched at the thought of needles, and the threat of reprogramming freaked him out, but…Impactor held down with someone wrist-deep in his chest, the miner's lazy confidence replaced by the look of odd, out-of-depth uncertainty like the one he'd kept shooting Megatron as the mod-artist talked, or the weirdly trusting grin he'd worn when he'd signed the studio's customer checklist after Megatron nodded approval…

Yeah.

Very conflicted libido.

He scraped up the courage to go back eventually, if only to convince his interface drive that it was entirely perverted to get off on anything involving needles. An apprehensive expression plastered on his face, he edged into the studio looking as though he was hiding behind the packet of mineral crisps he'd finally bought. Impactor and the piercer weren't at the front counter anymore.

Tanks churning queasily, Megatron ventured down the hall. "Hello?" The second door to the right opened as he drew even, and the big silver mech yelped as a hand dragged him inside.

Impactor slammed the door behind him. "'Bout time you got back - I'm bored off my drill! Why's this taking so long? I gotta sit half the night just to get a hole punched? This's scrap, recycled **scrap** ," he said at the piercer ignoring them from the other side of the cubicle, but Megatron got the brunt of his friend's complaints. "Why'd you hafta start into slag with Lockdown? We'd be back home by now if I'd just stuck it out with him. Should've just kicked you out and met you at the bar after I was done."

Megatron shrugged. "You could have."

"Your funeral," the mod-artist said subvocal.

"What was that?!" Impactor said, rounding on the guy, but it'd take more than a belligerent miner to intimidate him. The piercer pointed at the stool next to a sterile tray in the center of the room, and Impactor grumbled back over to sit down. "Yeah, yeah, sit still and don't touch anything. I know."

"Did you touch something?" Megatron eyed the pictures on the wall and swallowed the acidic sting at the back of his throat. His libido tucked tail and went to cringe somewhere behind the nightmare's he'd be having later. He hadn't known _that_ could be pierced. And that mod didn't look real at all. Who would install that?

Impactor shrugged, deliberately casual. "Might've."

"Impactor…"

"What? I'm bored!" He looked anything but bored, however. In fact, his buddy got positively squirmy the more he was poked and prodded, wiped down and readied, cables clamped out of the way and fluorescent dots drawn where the studs would punch through. The piercer set out sharp utensils on the sterile tray, ferrying equipment from the autoclave to lay out ready to use, and Impactor gave Megatron a questioning look at he was presented with slip after slip to sign, verifying that he'd witnessed the guy sterilize everything that would be used on him. Megatron nodded, and Impactor initialed the endless parade of little slips.

As preparations stretched on, the slight illness in Megatron's tanks progressed to a bubbling roil. There wasn't anything sexy at all about watching the mod-artist work his hand up into Impactor's chest storage space. The mech cabled in to negotiate program access from self-repair systems, lines of code running up the visor he clipped onto his helm to work through. Impactor watched him without qualm, apparently seeing nothing wrong with someone else messing with his programming, but it hit Megatron like a punch to the chest. The piercer was in Impactor's systems, modifying him from the inside out, and the outside in part would begin as soon as the autoclave finished its final sterilizing cycle.

Dread built in his tanks.

"I'm going for a walk," he announced fifteen minutes into the wait.

"What? But - "

"I told you I don't want to see it," he snapped, shoulders up around his audios as he rushed from the studio. "I'll be out front after you're done!"

Half an hour later, he swallowed rapidly against unsettled tanks as he hauled Impactor back through the door. "I can't believe you didn't buy the solvent."

"Aw, come on, it's not that important. Check these out!" Thrusting his chest out for display, Impactor grinned, practically giddy. He flinched a second later. "Ow." His fingers wincing away from the fresh holes. "Huh, they didn't hurt a second ago."

"You were high on action a second ago," Megatron muttered as he pushed Impactor's impressive rack out of his face. Dark and dust, that was the last thing he wanted to see right now. Urrrrgh, the flat, stubby bottoms of the studs stuck out underneath. "And it **is** important. Did you somehow miss the talk? Infections? Bad aftercare? Any of this sounding familiar?"

"Bad what?"

"Why do I even bother?" It was a rhetorical question. Megatron knew why he bothered. From the amused grin on the mod-artist's face, it was pretty fragging obvious why he bothered. That pissed Megatron off even more. He hated people getting into his business. Dragging Impactor across the studio by the elbow, he shoved his aftheaded pal at the piercer. "Buy the blasted solvent so we can get out of here!"

"This is the stuff you want," the artist said, wagging a bottle at them. "Use it at least twice a day, but probably at the start and end of every shift if you're working the mines. It's going to be tough keeping those," he pointed at the studs, "in a place that grubby, but if you're good at cleaning them, it might work out. Just keep flushing the grit out." Megatron could hear his doubt. The amusement, too. From how the bottle was held out to him and not Impactor, this guy understood who'd be the main motivational force behind any aftercare.

Especially since Impactor scoffed at the whole idea. "Yeah, yeah, 'aftercare.' It's just a way to sell overpriced bottles of regular solvent. No offense," he said as an afterthought.

"None taken," the artist said, and Megatron's powerplant rumbled as he realized he'd be the one buying the overpriced bottle. There went his funds for the bar until next payday.

"You owe me," Megatron snapped as they left. He stomped down the street ahead of his grinning friend.

"Whatever. C'mon, you gotta feel these things!"

Megatron glanced back and recoiled, face locked in a grossed-out grimace. His optics flickered pale pink. "They're bleeding!" A disgusting mix of repair nanites and lubricant, it looked like. The sludge dripped down Impactor's midriff at a slow trickle, lumpy and slippery in one. Megatron had never before wanted so badly to teleport back to the safety of their slot, hiding up on the top bunk to get away from _how utterly gross that was_.

"Well, yeah. They're holes. In my plating. Bleeding makes sense." Wasn't the nerd supposed to be the smart one? Duh. Of course holes bled. Impactor looked at his hands and blinked, surprised. "Oh, hey, they **are**. Huh. Didn't think they'd bleed this much." He looked around as if a rag would suddenly appear out of nowhere to wipe his hands on. "You got something I can - "

"Get away from me with that!"

Impactor stopped short, blinking. Megatron winced. Okay, that might have been an overreaction. Just a bit. He straightened up from a code-deep instinctive flinch away from the globby hands extended toward him. He wasn't one to care about fine manners, but that had been downright rude.

A second later, the lout he called a partner gave him yet more reason to control himself in the future.

"What, this?" Impactor swiped his hands underneath his chest compartments. They came out glistening with course, grainy streaks of nanites. "You don't like this? It's just repair slurry. Metal-melt from my piercings. Y'know. Where the needles went through. Needles, Megatron, needles."

"Cut that out." Fraggit, he _hated_ the automatic fear-jump in his pump every time he even heard the word. Megatron glared at the filthy fingers Impactor was examining. They wiggled threateningly in his direction, and he jerked back a step before he could stop himself. "Don't you dare."

"Dunno. They're kinda scary. Might have to keep them like…this." Smirking, Impactor put his hands out as if to get them away from himself, and Megatron cursed as they wriggled far too near for his comfort. "Maybe reprogramming's infectious. Wanna find out?"

"I hate yoo **aaugh** that's **disgusting!** Get away from me, you illegitimate spawn of a compactor!" Megatron fled, Impactor threatening to wipe viscous bodily fluids on his plating all the way back to the mines.

He almost decked the idiot when they hit the perimeter chainlink fence at the north end. Impactor tried to pin him against it, arms caging him in with his hand and drill laced through the fence on either side of him. Usually it was a ridiculous turn-on getting shoved into the swinging spring of the fence, Impactor holding him captive, their mouths hot against each other as they used the darkness just outside the edge of the floodlights to make out like delinquent shift-shirkers. Right now, turned on was the exact opposite of what Megatron felt. His engine revved in distress.

"Get off, get off, get **off!** "

"I'm tryin'," Impactor sniggered, leaning in, and Megatron threw his hands up between them to give a violent _shove_.

The bigger miner stumbled back, arms flailing and optics incandescent in sudden pain. "Ow! Ow, ow, what the frag was that?! I just got these, cogsucker, be careful!"

Megatron barely heard him through the static spitting in his audios. Optics sickly pale, he stared straight ahead. His arms were still up. His hands hung forgotten on the ends, fists slack, as all his attention focused on the slimy smear he could feel on his forearms.

Ewwwww.

"A more obnoxious bunkmate could not be imagined, nor conjured from the purged files left by defragmentation," he said in a voice devoid of all emotion. "Beware showing financial kindness to those unappreciative of your sacrifice, for they return payments in form of punishment for your foolishness."

"Did you just…" Impactor stared at him. "You did. You just poeted at me. You punch me in the piercings, and I'm the 'bot in trouble? How's that work? Fragging Pit."

Megatron turned to walk along the fence toward the gate, arms still held up like they no longer belonged to him. "On your head be your trials and tribulations. Sharing space, yet sharing more, knowing your limits tested by his uncouth nature, taking advantage of what is freely given."

"Aw, come on! At least tell me what I did!" Impactor chased after him. Megatron ignored his confused complaining, choosing to focus instead on composing scathing poetry out loud. It condemned his friend's lack of consideration and unwillingness to pay a debt unless badgered into it.

Business as usual, really, and nobody at the main gate thought anything of hearing Megatron using large words and larger concepts to browbeat Impactor. They thought quite a lot about Impactor's new accessories, however.

"Why did you put a hole in yourself?"

"How much did it cost?"

"Slag, you paid for that? You ask nice, and I'll shove something in you." Laughter rollicked around the lift as Impactor showed off his studs to fascinated, amazed, and absolutely repulsed miners and guards. Megatron slumped in the corner of the lift and tried to shut out the fuss.

"Did it hurt?"

"He squealed like bad tires, didn't he?" someone asked Megatron, trying to get him to spill the tale, but he didn't want to steal Impactor's spotlight. His buddy loved the attention. Megatron watched him proudly holding court, telling the night's story with more embellishments than it deserved - Megatron had _not_ been falling-down drunk, and Impactor certainly hadn't taken a swing at Lockdown - and attention shifted back to him when the silver miner stayed stubbornly silent.

"You squealed. You totally did."

"Didn't hurt at all!" Impactor bragged. "Just _crnch_ ," he mimed pushing through with his drill hand and the crowd cringed, delighted and gagging, "and it was done. Worst part was the wait! Guy did all the programming beforehand, measured everything, real professional. Good place, not like that Lockdown guy's place. You walked in there, you got oil up to your knees, I swear!"

Pfft, _now_ he made it sound like it'd been his idea to find a different place. By the end of the night, the story would probably grow into a mod-artist mafia chasing them across town as Impactor made a heroic stand against shadow-villain Lockdown, Megatron protected behind him.

Megatron crossed his arms and grumbled quietly. Typical Impactor.

In typical Impactor style, he had so much fun telling everyone about how easy it was to get the piercing done that he didn't go back to the slot. Off-shift miners normally spent their time in the bunk slots or up on the surface, but a loose cluster of mechs with nothing else to do sometimes hung out around the lift area underground. Impactor gathered a crowd quickly.

He waited for a few minutes, but Megatron had things he wanted to do since he was still sober tonight. Recharge, for one. And there had been something about how the piercer talked that he wanted to get down before he forgot the peculiar cadence of instructions, the rhythm of words, the flow of terminology. He had his tablet out well before he reached Slot #113, absorbed in writing even as he walked. People gave him funny looks as they passed, but he was used to it.

It was late in their off-cycle when Impactor slammed into the slot, hyped up on attention and coming down off the pain-high. Megatron had been mostly asleep, but he lit one optic enough to see if the noise was anything important. It was debatable whether or not Impactor qualified, but he grunted acknowledgement anyway. Miners weren't, by nature, the quiet types. Mechs down here in the dark could sleep through a cave-in, used to the noise level from equipment or exuberant miners passing by the doors. Megatron hadn't been sure he'd wake up when Impactor got back, so he'd been idly staying awake until his buddy got back.

"Wash," he ordered sleepily, pointing at the bottle he'd set on Impactor's bunk.

"Eh, I'll do it tomorrow," Impactor said as he pushed it aside to flop facedown. "Too achy."

How unsurprising. Megatron sighed and turned his face to the wall, deciding it wasn't his problem.

"Ow!"

"What?!" Yanked out of cycling down, Megatron scrambled to grab the nearest solid object, ready to fight if he had to.

Except his lights showed only Impactor. The other miner was gingerly easing his arm out from underneath his chest, shifting how he normally slept, and he gave Megatron a sheepish look. "Hurt," he said. "Wasn't expecting it, that's all. It's fine." He glanced down and seemed surprised by the sluggish bleed of clotted nanites now blotted onto his arm.

"You're an idiot," Megatron said, or at least he mumbled something to that effect as he curled back onto his side. He wasn't going to watch Impactor wipe off that gunk. "Gonna be worse in the morning," he added. "Should clean 'em now."

Impactor didn't. Megatron didn't even pretend he hadn't expected Impactor to snore right up until three minutes before their shift started. Impactor slept like a lump of lead. A good thing, since the piercings looked, if possible, worse. Even one look was enough to end Megatron's short internal debate about waking his buddy up early to wash the things. The slurry had crusted thick enough to cover all but the bottoms of the studs, and long, lumpy trails of fluids had slid down Impactor's midriff to drip into Cybertron's ugliest, grossest puddles of ooze on the bunk underneath him.

Uh-huh, nope, Megatron wasn't a caretaker. He went to wait outside for Impactor to wake up, unwilling to share a room with the mech. Quite frankly, the sight made him reconsider his long-held wish to train as a medic. If medics had to deal with infected piercings, he was perfectly okay with staying a miner.

Impactor was a big mech. He could handle personal hygiene without someone holding his hand, and if he couldn't, well, that's what Mediclav was down here for. Impactor could take his stubborn aft down to the medstation if he needed help.

That was the theory, but of course it broke down in practice. For one thing, Impactor didn't have money left in his emergency fund for a real medic, not until next payday. For another, his aft wasn't just stubborn, it was _proud_. Frag no, he wasn't going to ask for help. It'd make him a laughingstock, and a miner who lost face was a miner who never regained it. Supervisors already walked all over the people down here. Impactor didn't want the other miners thinking he was a foot cushion, too. He'd strutted around showing off his new piercings too much to knuckle under and ask for help this late. Primus help him if he lost the blasted things. A chunk of his dignity would go with them, not to mention it'd be throwing away the wad of shanix he'd blown on getting them in the first place.

Megatron avoided him for two days, unnerved. The nerd didn't get along with needles, alright, lesson learned. No need to start poeting at him. Impactor sullenly tried to find a comfortable position to sleep in every off-shift, squirming around on the bunk and wondering whose slot the silver mech had crashed in. It felt weird recharging without light in the other bunk, the sound of fingers tapping words onto the tablet a constant whenever Impactor cycled up.

The situation had spiraled out of Impactor's control by the time Megatron ventured back into their slot. The silver miner stopped short in the door, head jerking back. "You smell," he said flatly. His friend scowled but didn't comment, which told him exactly how well leaving him to handle the fresh piercing had worked. It reeked like an expired distillery in here, sort of wet and rotted, and Megatron pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth to block it out. "I'm not kidding. You smell like rust and bad welding. It didn't smell like this before. When's the last time you cleaned those things?"

"Uh…" Impactor already wasn't looking at him, but his optics actively slid away from Megatron's inquiring gaze.

It sharpened into a suspicious look. "Yesterday?"

"…sure. Yesterday."

Suspicion became an exasperated facepalm. "You haven't cleaned them at all, have you."

Impactor lasted two seconds before cracking. "I tried! But it's, y'know, dark. I couldn't see what I was doing, and it hurt to mess with 'em, so I figured they'd be fine on their own." He shrugged, stopping with his shoulders midway up. From the pain around his optics, Megatron could guess why.

"You. Are. An. **Idiot**." Stomping into the slot, Megatron grabbed his friend by the helmhawk and pulled him to sit forward on the bunk. "Sit up! You couldn't just ask me to turn on my headlights, no, of course **augh that's awful**."

He didn't teleport, but he did leap back as if spring-loaded. Impactor just looked down at himself, blinking. "Huh."

Even though Megatron glued himself to the bunk opposite, as far from the wet mess as physically possible, the extra lights revealed what Impactor's piercings had become. Liquidized paint had burst from the crusted nanites trying to scar over the open wounds, building up in thick, flaking streaks. Where the studs moved enough to crack the scab, discolored nanites dripped in smelly, viscerally disgusting proof of infected metal. The piercings resisted self-repair despite what had to be nonstop damage reports pinging the program.

It was kind of impressive, in a totally vile way. No wonder people at the weight stations had been commenting on the reek. Impactor must have just gotten used to it.

"Guess I should clean that," he said.

A rag doofed into his face. "Now!"

"Wanna help?"

"No! You stay over there and clean those slagging things." Megatron didn't even want to see them, although a sick curiosity compelled him to peek when Impactor sucked in a sharp breath. Slopping the open bottle toward the studs did nothing but splash solvent everywhere. Runnels of grimy, gritty slurry dripped down Impactor's midriff as the liquid started to loosen dried crusts, and Megatron deleted a purge request from his tanks. When they calmed, he managed some advice. "You're supposed to soak them first."

"Soak 'em how?" Leaning back and pouring the solvent into his chest compartment just ended in soaking the bunk as it promptly splooshed back out. It was a cascade of crudded-up solvent.

Purge requests pinged him repeatedly. Megatron put the back of his hand to his mouth as if stoppering the hole would keep his fuel down. "Just…cup your hands. Underneath." He gestured awkwardly with his free hand. "Make little pools to hold it in place."

Impactor watched, trying to interpret the jiggling gesture. Face squinched up somewhere between a scowl and a perplexed frown, he gave it a try. Cupping his left hand under his chest compartment, he cautiously felt around for the stud. He'd stubbed his fingers against the stupid thing too often in the past couple of days to just grab for it. It _hurt_ when he caught it on stuff. Careful or not, he still flinched when he found it.

Megatron noticed. The hand over his mouth lowered enough to show an evil little smile. Finally, some revenge for putting him through this. "And you said it didn't hurt."

"Shut up," his partner grumped. Grimacing, he tried to pour the solvent into his cupped hand. It leaked between his fingers as he brought it up to the hole, then flowed off the palm of his hand when he tried to correct the angle. His engine coughed angrily. "Slag." He tried again. Solvent splattered. His midriff was a half-cleaned mess of crusts, and he was sitting in a puddle. "Slaggit! It ain't working! Can't you just, uh…" Help him? Please?

Not that he was asking for help or anything.

Megatron stared at him, completely deadpan. "No." It didn't matter if Impactor was asking. This was as much help as he could expect.

"…yeah, maybe not. Maybe I can…" Impactor squirted a tiny pool of solvent into his hand and splashed it up against the underside of his chest, repeatedly washing solvent over the studs in hopes it would soak into the scabs. It worked, at least better than his attempts so far. Megatron looked extremely disturbed by the thick paste of decayed metal and lubricant that started dangling down in long, ugly strings after each splash, dripping solvent and paint. Impactor was mildly impressed by how terrible the sloppy mess look. "Ugh, wow. That looks gross as frag," he said He swiped the rag along the holes, fans stuttering as he pushed on the raw, new metal. More undried paint and lube gooshed from the raised, bubbled spots where infection had spread out from the holes. "Stings like a glitch. Nobody told me it'd sting."

"Nobody ever said it was like this," he complained as he kept poking and clumsily cleaning. Some of the crusts didn't wipe away, part of the holes slowly building up around the studs. "I got told 'bout it hurting to get done, but it didn't hurt. Now it hurts. It stings. It smells. It's starting to itch. Nobody ever said it'd itch!" The pain was giving Impactor a helm ache from damage reports hammering away at changed self-repair processes. The throbbing pulse made his tanks flip-flop inside him. It wasn't really _bad_ , but it felt different than a broken strut or smashed headlight. It was a hot, persistent ache. He didn't like it. It kept interrupting his recharge, when he _could_ recharge. Half the time, he spent the off-shift tossing and turning in a restless, bothered search for a position that eased the ache somehow.

Frag, he'd missed the nerd. Poetry recitals were a foolproof method of putting him to sleep, most of the time. He'd settle for poetry as a distraction, something to keep his mind off the hot itchy ache that picked up every time he stopped moving. That was the worst part. Whenever he found a comfortable position, one that didn't put pressure on his chest compartment or twist the cables up inside near the holes, he'd settle down, but less than a minute later, the background pain would barge into the forefront of his thoughts. He didn't _want_ to think about it, but it kept shoving his recharge protocols aside. If Megatron had just stayed in the slot, it'd have been enough of a distraction to keep the nagging pain at bay. Impactor knew it.

There wasn't much Megatron could have done about the annoying pain the rest of the time. Every time Impactor moved without thinking - which was often - he pulled against the healing holes. They stabbed sharp pain through him. Plus they smelled. And itched.

By now, Megatron was all but climbing up onto the top bunk to get away. "Don't scratch!" he barked, peering down from the safety of height and distance. "You just cleaned them out, don't shove scrap back in them."

Impactor flopped across his bunk dramatically. "I shouldn't have gotten these things."

Megatron stared down at him.

A few seconds later, the puddles of solvent on the bunk soaked through to dampen under his armor. "Yuck!"

The nerd snickered.

…it was still good to have him back. Impactor made a point of not flinging the slimy rag across the slot at him, just to keep the uneasy truce. Megatron still eyed his chest like it would bite him, but there was a silent agreement between them. As long as Impactor didn't harass the silver mech with ultra-gross fluids or trick him into looking at the mods more than three or four times a shift, Megatron bunked in the slot. He even, just the once, consented to help clean the holes. Perhaps not happily, but he did agree to it. There might have been a lost bet involved, and maybe some egging on by Impactor. Maybe a lot.

"This is the worst day of my life." Anyone looking at him would have been able to tell that. Megatron attempted his hardest to lean further away than his outstretched arm allowed, face turned away and optic shutters squeezed fully closed. Blindly waving the rag around counted as cleaning, surely. Impactor couldn't stop laughing to call him on it, anyway, and that was good enough.

Vents hiccupping, Impactor caught him by the wrist and guided the rag under his chest. Megatron promptly froze, afraid to move. Impactor almost snorted a fan laughing as he said, "H-here. Wipe here, ahaha, it won't, like, **spurt** at you!" His voice implied otherwise.

Face screwing up in the most revolted expression in the history of ever, Megatron made tentative dabbing motions.

It hurt in little heated stabs, but Impactor was laughing too hard to care.

So sometimes Impactor regretted the piercings. It seemed to take forever for the infection to go down. He couldn't sleep for the first week no matter how exhausted he was or how many bad limericks Megatron made him listen to. His bunk stayed wet for at least that long, perpetually soaked by the twice-daily cleaning. He ached for days, and the grit of the mines turned the holes into little hot spots seething with active nanites that never seemed to heal. Every time he thought the blasted things had scarred over for good, he'd move wrong and the crust would crack, drooling slurry and paint down his chest. It smelled. It itched itched _itched_ , and Megatron punched him in the shoulder if he absent-mindedly scratched. Or he'd scratch and have to gasp in a breath to cover a pained yip.

In conclusion: they sucked, and he'd wasted his money on studs he probably wouldn't be able to keep from rejecting. He'd never be able to afford bullbars at this rate.

Yet the longer he managed to keep them, the less he regretted getting them. The noxious leaking stage of healing lasted way too long, but making people gag was funny as slag. The entire hassle was almost worth it just to watch Megatron try to ignore him talking about the weird program gibberish he got from his self-repair anytime an infection started. Megatron hated hearing about the details. Plus there were some people who never got over the scandalized phase of where he'd gotten the studs, much less the actual metal punching part. The best part of Impactor's days lately was toying with the studs while standing in line at the weight station. His supervisor's face tried to suck in on itself whenever he caught sight of the piercings. It was _hilarious_.

He spent more than he wanted on inert solvent instead of drinks, but the studs didn't reject. The holes healed, and split, and healed, and oozed, and then they healed again. One day, he realized he could twist the studs around in the holes without it hurting. He immediately tweaked them sideways and regretted everything all over again, but it was progress.

There was one maddening part of the piercings, however. They looked cool - when they weren't infected - and they were healing fine, but the itching kind of felt like excess charge. It crawled through the oversensitized nerve wiring in his chest compartments. The stud ends rubbed against his coiled cables, raising a prickle of friction that built up and up without easing the itch at all. His cables shifted naturally as he moved, brushing against the edges of the holes with a sensation similar to but not quite pain. It felt like electricity. It felt like charge waiting to transmit.

His chest teased from itching to aroused anytime anybody bumped into him, basically. An awesome side-effect, one he'd heard about and had hoped he'd get from the bullbars once they were installed, except everything he'd heard had left out one tiny detail. The detail being that a mech's fragbuddy had to be just as into the piercings as he was, and Megatron was manifestly _not_.

"No."

"C'mon, it's just a frag!" Impactor demanded. Alright, so he whined. It'd been two weeks! Two _days_ without interfacing was pushing it, especially for somebody sharing a slot with a shiny silver piece of aft like Megatron, but two weeks? This was cruel and unusual punishment!

Megatron was unmoved. "Go frag somebody else, then," he said from the top bunk. He'd refused to recharge on the bottom bunk since the second time Impactor cleaned out the piercings. Flakes of dried, crusted paint, rusted grains of metal, and dead nanites had smudged everywhere, sludgy gloops of reeking pipe-waste smeared on the floor and bunk, and that didn't even come close to describing the smell. He'd sought refuge away from Impactor and the sound effects up top.

"Come oooooooon." Definitely a whine. Megatron didn't dignify it with a reaction. Impactor narrowed his optics up at him, engine growling. What did it take to get a frag around here?

It didn't even occur to him to wonder why he was begging Megatron for interfacing when there were a dozen or more miners down the hall willing to do him just for a chance to poke and prod his mods. Although that likely explained why he didn't want to frag them. Good as the studs looked clean and healing, the holes themselves nipped and stung whenever he played with them. Waiting for them to heal was so slagging tedious. He had to wait, and take care of them, and keep clean, and Impactor just wanted some fun.

"You don't have to look at 'em?" he offered after thinking. "I'm fine on my knees. Clang me from behind, mech."

"No. You get too into it." Meaning that he didn't trust his own self-control. Impactor always wanted it faster and harder, and he was smelting hot when Megatron had him wrapped around his spike, flexing and thrusting back against him. He'd have Impactor pinned face into the bunk halfway through, riding him like he was fighting it, and the crazy glitch probably wouldn't even notice the studs catch on the bunk until after the holes tore open. They'd stretched out his treads more than once like that, and as much fun as wall sex was, they'd crossed it off their list of activities after the time Impactor left his front grille attached to a rough patch on the wall.

"Megatrooooon."

"No!" Megatron buried himself in poetry. Hardcore poetry writing, the kind that could endure even loud clanging from the bunk beside him. Nothing but a new bookfile download or the next shift was going to disturb him now.

Impactor chose to sit and sulk instead of finding someone else for a frag. It just didn't seem like as much fun when it involved anyone other than his friend. Too much guilt.

He didn't think on that.

Three days later, he pestered Megatron into a good hard frag. It didn't even hurt. Much. He didn't tell the nerd when sliding back and forth started irritating the studs. He just flipped them over and hunched over to keep the holes out of sight. Between the darkness in the bunk slot and how occupied Megatron was 'facing the bolts off him, it worked out. He got his itch scratched, and Megatron stopped avoiding him like his chest carried Red Rust. It wasn't quite to the point of Megatron playing with the mods while they got off, but Impactor figured they could work up to that.

He was right. Once Megatron witnessed the weight station overseer squirming, grossed out, he got over his own squeamishness real fast.

Another day, another line. Impactor stood beside his friend and 'just happened' to toy with the studs. Their supervisor was putting on a show of concentrating on the work chart, but most of the other miners had caught onto Impactor's game. They smirked evilly and made sure nothing blocked the view.

Megatron leaned in to whisper, "Hold on." Impactor glanced at him, curious, but Megatron caught him around the waist a second later, ducking down to -

"Primus!"

The guys beside them barely dodged in time. Metal shrieked as Impactor's drill caught on a loading cart, and his flailing hand grabbed at the wall. Megatron chuckled, pulling him closer to get a better angle.

"Fragging Pit!" Impactor shouted, back arching to push into the soft suck.

Warmth caressed around the stud, pressing it the slightest bit to put a hint of pressure on the cables coiled inside his chest compartment. Megatron relented when Impactor's engine turned over, but only enough to let his tongue return to circling the stud. He let go in order to switch to the other stud, closing his mouth over it enough to suckle at the mod. The slurping suck was obscenely loud in the suddenly silent tunnel, audible even over the roar of Impactor's engine.

"Frag," someone said eloquently.

"Where's he's going?" someone asked as the overseer dropped everything to hustle toward the office door.

"Purge," eight miners said at once, gleeful. "Free break!"

"Glrrrk," Impactor added. His hand pawed at Megatron's helm. Soft, wet warmth pulled gently at the stud, sucking and releasing in a teasing rhythm that sent charge rocketing to his groin.

This was clearly the best idea he'd ever had.

He hesitated once he'd hauled Megatron out of the lighted areas. Catcalling laughter from the rest of the miners followed them, feeding the urgent burn in his chest, but he pulled out of the rough kiss. "Just don't bite down," he mumbled without meeting his friend's optics.

Which crinkled at the corners in good humor. "Or pull on them or push them too hard or use them to suspend things by. I'm the one who read the aftercare sheet, remember? I won't," Megatron said as he bent down to mouth the studs, "even use those stupid bullbars as handlebars once they're in."

There went that fantasy. But the nerd did tend to know best, Impactor reflected. His helm fell back, and thinking about anything but Megatron's mouth traveling lower became a lost cause. Best idea ever.

* * *

 **[* * * * *]**


End file.
